A perpetual
pair of glasses astride of this fine ridge, and a line, unusually
deep and drawn, the prolonged pen-stroke of time, accompanying the
curve of the moustache from nostril to chin, did something to
complete the facial furniture that an attentive observer would have
seen catalogued, on the spot, in the vision of the other party to
Strether's appointment. She waited for him in the garden, the other
party, drawing on a pair of singularly fresh soft and elastic light
gloves and presenting herself with a superficial readiness which,
as he approached her over the small smooth lawn and in the watery
English sunshine, he might, with his rougher preparation, have
marked as the model for such an occasion. She had, this lady, a
perfect plain propriety, an expensive subdued suitability, that her
companion was not free to analyse, but that struck him, so that his
consciousness of it was instantly acute, as a quality quite new to
him. Before reaching her he stopped on the grass and went through
the form of feeling for something, possibly forgotten, in the light
overcoat he carried on his arm; yet the essence of the act was no
more than the impulse to gain time. Nothing could have been odder
than Strether's sense of himself as at that moment launched in
something of which the sense would be quite disconnected from the
sense of his past and which was literally beginning there and then.
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