Mrs Tomlinson, naked and lightly steamed, was all rosy curves. All cream-smooth skin puckered and stippled and flustered and whipped up, by the heat, into mobile rashes and foxings of colour. Her noble bosom, uncovered and unsupported, spread wider than her ribs, and jostled out into heavy, rich, pendant udders, whose general blush concentred in fat raspberry-coloured nubbins thick as thumbs. Her wide hips, canted out to exaggerate a swell already near the limit of the probable, spread from her narrow waist like a lyre. Her belly dipped into a crease touched with brownish-pink at her navel, then swelled out again, descending, into a lesser hill, and a lower yet, valleyed and russet-lipped, tangled with springy hair where the steam collected and dripped. – How hard it is to describe a desirable woman without running into geography! Or the barnyard. Or the resources of the fruit-bowl. As if flesh itself, bare vulnerable flesh-of-our-flesh, were not enough, considered merely as itself, and we could not account for its power, without fetching away into similes. I do not want to write this part of the story, and am quibbling to hesitate. – The grave beauty of her face seemed to contradict the lush abundance of her body, yet both were true of her, and in truth contradicted each other as little as any two qualities whatsoever happening to be possessed by an individual: the contradiction existing only in the expectation of an onlooker who had presumed a whole woman would conform to a single impression. Who, finding she didn’t, might if sufficiently led by his loins, choose to interpret the double impression as an extra piquancy. And the effect of the years on Mistress Terpie? Let us be painterly. Let us say, it cannot be denied that the line of beauty had wavered, wandered, thickened in her, with time. Where before there had been the perfect serpentine bow of the river there was now the braided spread of a delta. But magnificence blurred is still magnificence.

— Golden Hill por Francis Spufford