Page:The Ambassadors (London, Methuen & Co., 1903).djvu/272

266 gracious—had in fact rarely seen her shy or dry; her marked, thin-lipped smile, intense without brightness and as prompt to act as the scrape of a safety-match; the protrusion of her rather remarkably long chin, which in her case represented invitation and urbanity, and not, as in most others, pugnacity and defiance; the penetration of her voice to a distance, the general encouragement and approval of her manner, were all elements with which intercourse had made him familiar, but which he noted to-day almost as if she had been a new acquaintance. This first glimpse of her had given a brief but vivid accent to her resemblance to her mother; he could have taken her for Mrs. Newsome while she met his eyes as the train rolled into the station. It was an impression that quickly dropped; Mrs. Newsome was much handsomer, and while Sarah inclined to the massive, her mother had, at an age, still the waist of a girl; the latter's chin, moreover, was rather short than long, and her smile, by good fortune, much more—oh, ever so much more—restfully dim. Strether had seen Mrs. Newsome reserved; he had literally heard her silent; though he had never known her disagreeable. It was the case with Mrs. Pocock that he had known her disagreeable, even though he had never known her not affable. She had forms of affability that were in a high degree affirmative; nothing, for instance, had ever been more striking than that she was affable to Jim.

What had told, at any rate, at the window of the train was her high, clear forehead—that forehead which her friends, for some reason, always thought of as a "brow"; the long reach of her eyes—it came out at this juncture in such a manner as to remind him oddly enough also of that of Waymarsh's; and the unusual gloss of her dark hair, dressed and hatted after her mother's refined example, with such an avoidance of extremes that it was always spoken of at Woollett as "their own." Though this analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform, it had lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise