were wet as though they had just
been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so
fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots. Tirelessly the woman
marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling
silent, and pegging out more diapers, and more and yet more. He wondered
whether she took in washing for a living or was merely the slave of twenty
or thirty grandchildren. Julia had come across to his side; together they
gazed down with a sort of fascination at the sturdy figure below. As he
looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching
up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him
for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to
him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by
childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the
grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and
after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block
of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of
a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior
to the flower?
'She's beautiful,' he murmured.
'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.
'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
He held Julia's supple waist easily encircled by his arm. From the hip
to the knee her flank was against his. Out of their bodies no child would
ever come. That was the one thing they cou

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