Oliver Bacon, the jeweler, is really the only developed character in the short story. The Duchess is more of a stock figure, entering Bacon's office with "the aroma, the prestige, the arrogance, the pomp" of any of her kind, explicitly represented as "all the Dukes and Duchesses swollen in one wave." Like an effective political cartoon, she has a dominant feature, in this case the image of the wave, which Woolf, in a metaphoric flourish, uses to convey her presence: And as a wave breaks, she broke, as she sat down, spreading and splashing and falling over Oliver Bacon, the great jeweler, covering him with sparkling bright colors . . . for she was very large, very fat, tightly girt in pink taffeta.

The contrast between the sprawling, voluminous being and the confinement of her garments expresses her lack of inner discipline or firm character, and words like "shut," "subsided," and...