should tell her what a fright it makes of her.
She is nothing but convexities. She looks exactly like an hour-glass,
or a sodawater machine. At a little distance you can hardly tell
whether she is coming to you, or going away from you. She looks just
the same all round. People call her smile sweet; but then it is the
mere sweetness of inanity. It is the blank brightness of an empty
chamber. She sheds these smiles upon everyone and everything, and they
are felt to be cold like moonshine. Speaking for myself, these
_eau-sucre_ smiles could not suckle my love. I would languish upon
them. My love demands stronger drink. Mrs. Smith's features are good,
no doubt. Her eyes are good. An oculist would be satisfied with them.
They have a cornea, a crystalline lens, a retina, and so on, and she
can see with them. This is all very satisfactory, I do not deny, as
far as it goes. Physiologically her eyes are admirable; but for
poetry, for love, or even for flirting, they are useless. There is no
significance in them, no witchery, no suggestiveness. The aurora of
beautiful far-away thoughts does not coruscate in them. Her eyelids
conceal them, but do not quench them. They would be nothing for
winking, or tears. If she winked at me, I should not jump into the
air, as if shot in the spine, with my blood tingling to my
extremities; my heart would not beat like a side-drum; my blushes
would not come perspiring through my whiskers. Her winking would
altogether misfire. Why? Because her winking would be physiological
and not erotic. If you ever learnt to love her, it would not be for
any lovelight in her eye; it would never be the quick, fierce, hot,
biting electric passion of the fleshly poets, it would be what a
chemist might call the "eremacausis" kindled by habit. Mrs. Smith's
tears are quite the poorest product of the lachrymal glands I have
ever seen. They are simply a form of water. They might dribble from an
effete pump; they might leak from a worn-out _mashq_.[AA] I observe
them with pity and regret. Their drip has no echo in my bosom; it
produces no stalactites of sympathy in my heart.

I have often been told that her nose was good--and good it
unquestionably is--good for blowing; good for sneezing; good for
snoring; good for smelling; a fine nose for a catarrh. But who could
play with it? Who could tweak it passionately, as a prelude to
kissing? Who could linger over it tenderly with a candle, or a lump of
mutton fat, when cold