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 could never do. Only by word of
mouth, from mind to mind, could they pass on the secret. The woman down
there had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile
belly. He wondered how many children she had given birth to. It might
easily be fifteen. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of
wild-rose beauty and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit
and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering,
scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing,
laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty
unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing. The mystical
reverence that he felt for her was somehow mixed up with the aspect of the
pale, cloudless sky, stretching away behind the chimney-pots into
interminable distance. It was curious to think that the sky was the same
for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under
the sky were also very much the same -- everywhere, all over the world,
hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ig

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