The lady kissed us both, told us
to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her
hair.
I remember this was the occasion on which my brother discovered a good
many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto been
beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and 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.
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