eanwhile, being
purposely misshapen in this direction and in that, to hide--it must be
presumed--deficiencies of form. If that chignon and those heels had been
taken off, the figure which would have remained would have been that too
often of a puny girl of sixteen. And yet there was no doubt that these
women were not only full grown, but some of them, alas! wives and
mothers.

Poor little things.--And this they have gained by so-called civilisation:
the power of aping the "fashions" by which the worn-out Parisienne hides
her own personal defects; and of making themselves, by innate want of
that taste which the Parisienne possesses, only the cause of something
like a sneer from many a cultivated man; and of something like a sneer,
too, from yonder gipsy woman who passes by, with bold bright face, and
swinging hip, and footstep stately and elastic; far better dressed,
according to all true canons of taste, than most town-girls; and thanking
her fate that she and her "Rom" are no house-dwellers and
gaslight-sightseers, but fatten on free air upon the open moor.

But the face which is beneath that chignon and that hat? Well--it is
sometimes pretty: but how seldom handsome, which is a higher quality by
far. It is not, strange to say, a well-fed face. Plenty of money, and
perhaps too much, is spent on those fine clothes. It had been better, to
judge from the complexion, if some of that money had been spent in solid
wholesome food. She looks as if she lived--as she too often does, I
hear--on tea and bread-and-butter, or rather on bread with the minimum of
butter. For as the want of bone indicates a deficiency of phosphatic
food, so does the want of flesh about the cheeks indicate a deficiency of
hydrocarbon. Poor little Nausicaa:--that is not her fault. Our boasted
civilisation has not even taught her what to eat, as it certainly has not
increased her appetite; and she knows not--what every country fellow
knows--that without plenty of butter and other fatty matters, she is not
likely to keep even warm. Better to eat nasty fat bacon now, than to
supply the want of it some few years hence by nastier cod-liver oil. But
there is no one yet to tell her that, and a dozen other equally simple
facts, for her own sake, and for the sake of that coming Demos which she
is to bring into the world; a Demos which, if we can only keep it healthy
in body and brain, has before it so splendid a future: but which, if body
and brain d