“There is something terrible about it,” she murmured, half to herself, “something insensate. In a way, it doesn’t seem human. It’s like a great tidal wave. It’s all very well for the individual just so long as he can keep afloat, but once fallen, how horribly quick it would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible indifference! I suppose it’s civilisation in the making, the thing that isn’t meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental, too⁠—primordial; like the first verses of Genesis.”