Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face. While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial way.'
Betty Ochiltree's beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a face 'frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as honest as the day,' surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself with dignity, 'as few Australian girls can do.' And how impressive and consistent with her character is the noble, placid figure of Elizabeth King, 'perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity and ease!'
The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the age of thirty, or even more. 'In real life,' she once observes, 'the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age ... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days--so highly developed, so subtly compounded--has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction--a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.'
When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes them to appear--'the men out of books that we meet every day.' Of little men, in the physical sense, there are only two of any importance, but even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would seem to be to show the sexes what each chiefly admires in the other. It is first a sort of apotheosis of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, and after that an illustration of the independent attractions of sympathy, gentleness, culture, and high character.
Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm, nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the pathetic Hilda Donne in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. Can you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not going to be quite shut out--once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is for one's body that one is loved, and not for one's soul.'