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