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 an opposition between them which he
might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected
it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a
short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might
be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite
the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a
concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he
made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes
were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost
have been absent without changing his face, which took its
expression mainly, and not least its stamp of sensibility, from
other sources, surface and grain and form.
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