" My mind was a little distracted from these anxieties by our encountering a singularly beautiful girl. I should mention, perhaps, lest I be thought in any wat to have misled my readers, that her figure was pudgy, her complexion sallow and her hair a rather drab shade of brown. These possible defects, however, pass unnoticed in a young woman whose expression is that of a medieval saint after a particularly satisfactory vision of the Eternal City. "

― Sarah Caudwell , Thus Was Adonis Murdered (Hilary Tamar, #1)