Now, I have a theory that women do not love their husbands ... I hold that married life is a long-drawn ordeal, which no man short of a Chevalier Bay… - Joseph Furphy

Pritchard senior died of some unpronounceable scientific term signifying internal haemorrhage of irascibility and malevolence.

... I noticed both women's eyes fixed on my face, with a disconcerting interest in the casual gossip. It is humiliating when you feel yourself expected to say something good, and a swift reconnaissance of the subject shows you no opening for anything beyond what a nobleman might drivel. Moreover, I was fresh from the pastoral regions, where etiquette demands frank, unsolicited, and copious comment on the merits or demerits of some absent person ...

Better we were cold and still, with our famous Jim and Bill, Beneath the interdicted wattle-bough,
For the angels made our date five-and-twenty years too late, And there is no for us now.