Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/11



ROM a back window of my tall house in Calcutta I see her nearly every day, the lady who may personify Eurasia. She is amply qualified to do it; Nature in molding her permitted her to lack no characteristic that could contribute to make her a generous racial type. She is cast upon the comfortable lines common to her people—lines that could not be indicated in avoirdupois under two hundred-weight. They are more evident to me than even this statement of fact can make them to the public, since Mrs. De Souza—her name is De Souza—is usually clad, when she comes under my observation, in a casual calico dressing-gown, which leaves little of her benevolent person to be invented. The dressing-gown is open at the throat on account of the temperature, but in compensation there is a great deal of it at the other end; it is en traine and has a flounce. Once, doubtless, it ministered to her vanity, for even at that age—she is turned fifty—and at that weight, Mrs. De Souza and vanity are not incompatible. There is Mrs. De Souza's complexion, for example—she has always been very properly vain of that. It is quite an exceptional complexion, oatmeal in tone. Eurasia, which verges from that to mahogany, considers Mrs. De Souza "fair," and her claims to