Frank Ellinger was a bachelor of forty, six feet two, with long straight legs, fine shoulders, and a figure that still permitted his white waistcoat to button without a wrinkle under his conspicuously well-cut dinner coat. His black hair, coarse and curly as the filling of a mattress, was grey about the ears, his florid face showed little purple veins about his beaked nose,—a nose like the prow of a ship, with long nostrils. His chin was deeply cleft, his thick curly lips seemed very muscular, very much under his control, and, with his strong white teeth, irregular and curved, gave him the look of a man who could bite an iron rod in two with a snap of his jaws.
Everything about Frank's description is deliberately imposing, he is a middle aged man who has seen both the best and the worst of the world, who towers over his peers with his massive height. Everything about him is suffocatingly overpowering, which evidently foreshadows his rather destructive nature in relation to the Forresters, he tends to Marian while Daniel is away behind his back, and eventually discards Marian for Constance. Paying no mind to the destruction left in his wake.