In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion to the heroine of _Fidelis_ by being shown in successive attachments to other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises that, 'the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the laws of Nature,' Adam is certain to suffer in the reader's good opinion for having 'continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his daily dinner.' No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped marriage--first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with the daughter of his landlady--and that at another period of his colonial life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author anticipates; at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have been. It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge's best novels. In each, whatever the quality of the plot, there are always two or three personages who talk and act as real men and women do--now rationally or in obedience to custom, now passionately or with that perversity which, as the author once describes it, 'is like a natural law, independent of other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.' They are mostly big people with big appetites. The beauty of the women is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health. Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an intelligent, eager face, though 'her mouth was large, her nose not all it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and veils.' She was 'not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.' Sarah French, the girl in _Fidelis_ whose comeliness so nearly drew the hero from his old allegiance, has 'a strong and good, rather than a pretty, face,' with a 'large and substantial figure.' Adam Drewe concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress.... She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood--of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to play the part.' Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face. While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial way.'