Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/14

8 address to him, equally with his own response, had been, he would have sketched to himself his impression of her as: "Well, she's more subtly civilised—! " If "More subtly than whom?" would not have been for him a sequel to this remark, that was just by reason of his deep consciousness of the bearing of his comparison.

The amusement, at all events, of a civilisation more subtle was what—familiar compatriot as she was, with the full tone of the compatriot and the rattling link, not with mystery, but only with dear dyspeptic Waymarsh—she appeared distinctly to promise. His pause while he felt in his overcoat was positively the pause of confidence, and it enabled his eyes to make out as much of a case for her, in proportion, as her own made out for himself. She affected him as almost insolently young; but an easily-carried five-and-thirty could still do that. She was, however, like himself, marked and wan; only it naturally couldn't have been known to him how much a spectator looking from one to the other might have discerned that they had in common. It would not for such a spectator have been altogether insupposable that, each so finely brown and so sharply spare, each confessing so to dents of surface and aids to sight, to a disproportionate nose and a head delicately or grossly grizzled, they might have been brother and sister. On this ground, indeed, there would still have been a residuum of difference; such a sister having known, surely, in respect to such a brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother feeling now, in respect to such a sister, the extremity of surprise. Surprise, it was true, was not, on the other hand, what the eyes of Strether's friend most showed him while she gave him, stroking her gloves smoother, the time he appreciated. They had taken hold of him straightway, measuring him up and down, as if they knew how; as if he were human material they had already in some sort handled. Their possessor was in truth, it may be communicated, the mistress of a hundred cases or categories, receptacles of the mind, subdivisions for convenience, in which, from a full experience, she pigeon-holed her fellow-mortals with a hand as free as that of a compositor scattering type. She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made