Women
Fat women with flabby, double
chins. Moon-faced, pop-eyed women in little flat hats. Women with starchy faces
and thin vermilion lips.
Man-shy, suspicious women,
shrinking into their clothes every time a wet, caressing eye alights upon them.
Women soured and robbed of their souls by Christian Endeavour. Women who would
probably be members of Conference if they were men.
Grey-haired, middle-aged,
waddling women, wrecked and unsexed by endless, useless parturition, nursing,
worry, sacrifice. Women who look as if they were still innocent yesterday
afternoon. Women in shoes that bend their insteps to preposterous semi-circles.
Women with green, barbaric
bangles in their ears like the concubines of Arab horse-thieves. Women looking
in show-windows, wishing that their husbands were not such poor sticks.
Shapeless women lolling in six thousand dollar motorcars.
Trig little blondes, stepping
like Shetland ponies. Women smelling of musk, ambergris, bergamot. Long-legged,
cadaverous, hungry women. Women eager to be kidnapped, betrayed, forced into
marriage at the pistol's point. Soft, pulpy, pale women.
Women with ginger-coloured
hair and large, irregular freckles. Silly, chattering, gurgling women. Women
showing their ankles to policemen, chauffeurs, street-cleaners. Women with
slim-shanked, whining, sticky-fingered children dragging after them. Women
marching like grenadiers.
Yellow women. Women with red
hands. Women with asymmetrical eyes. Women with rococo ears. Stoop-shouldered
women. Women with huge hips. Bow-legged women. Appetising
women. Good-looking women...
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