e 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, not always
positively forbidding, yet calmly terrible, not merely by its breadth
and weight of feature, but because it seems to express so much
well-founded 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 cannot 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.

You can meet this figure in the street, and live, and even smile at the
recollection. But conceive of her in a ball-room, with the bare, brawny
arms that she invariably displays there, and all the other corresponding
development, such as is beautiful in the maiden blossom, but a spectacle
to howl at in such an overblown cabbage-rose as this.

Yet, somewhere in this enormous bulk there must be hidden the modest,
slender, violet-nature of a girl, whom an alien mass of earthliness has