continually passing in the streets. The worst of Bath was the number of its plain women. He did not mean to say that there were no pretty women, but the number of the plain was out of all proportion. He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop in Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them. It had been a frosty morning, to be sure, a sharp frost, which hardly one woman in a thousand could stand the test of. But still, there certainly were a dreadful multitude of ugly women in Bath; and as for the men! they were infinitely worse. Such scarecrows as the streets were full of! It was evident how little the women were used to the sight of anything tolerable, by the effect which a man of decent appearance produced. He had never walked anywhere arm-in-arm with Colonel Wallis (who was a fine military figure, though sandy-haired) without observing that every woman’s eye was upon him; every woman’s eye was sure to be upon Colonel
¡Modesto Sir Walter! No le permitieron escapar, sin embargo. Su hija y la señora Clay se unieron para insinuar que el compañero del coronel Wallis podía tener tan buena planta como el coronel Wallis, y desde luego no era pelirrojo.
—¿Qué tal tiene el aspecto Mary? —dijo sir Walter, en su mejor momento de buen humor—. La última vez que la vi tenía la nariz roja, pero espero que eso no le pase todos los días.
“¡Oh!, no, eso debió de ser totalmente accidental. En general ha estado gozando de muy buena salud y muy buen aspecto desde San Miguel”.