Michon, you can pull a little tighter still.

I know you are no lover of waists, doctor.

Nevertheless, I cannot wear swaddling bands like those aesthetic creatures.

Just slip your hand into my stays, and you'll see that I don't squeeze myself too tight." He denied that he was inimical to stays; he only condemned them when too tightly laced.

He deplored the fact that women should have no sense of the harmony of line; that they should associate with smallness of the waist an idea of grace and beauty, not realizing that their beauty resided wholly in those modulations through which the body, having displayed the superb expansion of chest and bosom, tapers off gradually below the thorax, to glorify itself in the calm and generous width of the flanks.
"The waist," he said, "the waist, since one has to make use of that hideous word, should be a gradual, imperceptible, gentle transition from one to another of woman's two glories, her bosom and her womb, and you stupidly strangle it, you stave in the thorax, which involves the breasts in its ruin, you flatten your lower ribs, and you plough a horrible furrow above the navel.