clothes
which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to me, "all
solid woman," but that women were not in reality more substantially built
than men, and had legs as much as he had--a fact which he had never yet
realised. On this he for a long time considered them as impostors, who
had wronged him by leading him to suppose that they had far more "body in
them" (so he said) than he now found they had.

This was a sort of thing which he regarded with stern moral reprobation.
If he had been old enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put
the matter into his hands, as well as certain other things which had
lately troubled him. For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and
he had seen it plucked, and the inside taken out; his irritation had been
extreme on discovering that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that
their insides--and these formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous
percentage of the bird--were perfectly useless. He was now beginning to
understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as good meat was
concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in comparison with what
they ought to have considering their apparent bulk: insignificant, mere
skin and bone covering a cavern. What right had they, or anything else,
to assert themselves as so big, and prove so empty? And now this
discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too much for him. The world
itself was hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing.

Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was to be
exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto. If
a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;
nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he had
himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of changing;
there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were to
be perfectly consistent, and all premisses to be carried with extremest
rigour to their legitimate conclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for
he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous
system, such as those caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in
the streets. God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear
some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother.

Such were the ideal theories of his chi