r instead of a coal!

THE BRITISH MATRON

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

I have heard a good deal of the tenacity with which English ladies
retain their personal beauty to a late period of life; but (not to
suggest that an American eye needs use and cultivation, before it can
quite appreciate the charm of English beauty at any age) it strikes me
that an English lady of fifty is apt to become a creature less refined
and delicate, so far as her physique goes, than anything that we Western
people class under the name of woman. She has an awful ponderosity of
frame, not pulpy, like the looser development of our few fat women, but
massive with solid beef and streaky tallow; so that (though struggling
manfully against the idea) you inevitably think of her as made up of
steaks and sirloins. When she walks, her advance is elephantine. When
she sits down it is on a great round space of her Maker's footstool,
where she looks as if nothing could ever move her. She imposes awe and
respect by the muchness of her personality, to such a degree that you
probably credit her with far greater moral and intellectual force than
she can fairly claim. Her visage is usually grim and stern, seldom
positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth
and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much
well-defined self-reliance, such acquaintance with the world, its toils,
troubles, and dangers, and such sturdy capacity for trampling down a
foe. Without anything positively salient, or actively offensive, or,
indeed, unjustly formidable to her neighbors, she has the effect of a
seventy-four-gun ship in time of peace; for, while you assure yourself
that there is no real danger, you can not help thinking how tremendous
would be her onset, if pugnaciously inclined, and how futile the effort
to inflict any counter-injury. She certainly looks tenfold--nay, a
hundredfold--better able to take care of herself than our slender-framed
and haggard womankind; but I have not found reason to suppose that the
English dowager of fifty has actually greater courage, fortitude, and
strength of character than our women of similar age, or even a tougher
physical endurance than they. Morally, she is strong, I suspect, only in
society, and in the common routine of social affairs, and would be found
powerless and timid in any exceptional strait that might call for energy
outside of the conventionalities amid which she has grown up.

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