creatures!

_Grey_. It is true, that ruffs and stomachers seem to indicate great
propriety of conduct, including an aversion to children and--other
troublesome creatures; but students of the manners and morals of the
period at which those articles of dress were worn do not find that the
women who wore them differed much in their conduct, at least as to the
other troublesome creatures, from the women who nowadays have revived
one of the most unsightly and absurd traits of the costume of which
ruffs and stomachers formed a part.

_Mrs. Grey_. What can you mean? Our fashion like that frightful rig?
Why, see this portrait of Queen Elizabeth in full dress! What with
stomacher and pointed waist and fardingale, and sticking in here and
sticking out there, and ruffs and cuffs and ouches and jewels and
puckers, she looks like a hideous flying insect with expanded wings,
seen through a microscope,--not at all like a woman.

_Grey_. And her costume is rivalled, if not outdone, by that of her
critic, in the very peculiarity by which she is made to look most unlike
a woman;--the straight line of the waist and the swelling curve below
it, which meet in such a sharp, unmitigated angle. Look at the Venus
yonder,--she is naked to the hips,--and see how utterly these lines
misrepresent those of Nature. You will find no instance of such a
contour as is formed by the meeting of these lines among all living
creatures, except, perhaps, when a turtle thrusts his head and his tail
out of his shell.

_Miss Larches_. But there's a vase with just such an outline, that I
have heard you admire a hundred times.