feels, you would be no wiser for
my account than a blind man to whom you describe a face in detail.
Remember that when a blind man recovers his sight, he does not recognize
the commonest thing that has been familiar to his touch, the dearest
face intimate to his fingers, and it does not help him at all that
things and people have been described to him again and again. So you,
who are untrained of touch, do not recognize a hand by the grasp; and
so, too, any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted
with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and
which my affection translates to my memory.

I cannot describe hands under any class or type; there is no democracy
of hands. Some hands tell me that they do everything with the maximum of
bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous,
fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of
daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid
hand of one who tells with many words news that is no news. I have met a
bishop with a jocose hand, a humourist with a hand of leaden gravity, a
man of pretentious valour with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic
man with a fist of iron. When I was a little girl I was taken to see[A]
a woman who was blind and paralysed. I shall never forget how she held
out her small, trembling hand and pressed sympathy into mine. My eyes
fill with tears as I think of her. The weariness, pain, darkness, and
sweet patience were all to be felt in her thin, wasted, groping, loving
hand.

Few people who do not know me will understand, I think, how much I get
of the mood of a friend who is engaged in oral conversation with
somebody else. My hand follows his motions; I touch his hand, his arm,
his face. I can tell when he is full of glee over a good joke which has
not been repeated to me, or when he is telling a lively story. One of
my friends is rather aggressive, and his hand always announces the
coming of a dispute. By his impatient jerk I know he has argument ready
for some one. I have felt him start as a sudden recollection or a new
idea shot through his mind. I have felt grief in his hand. I have felt
his soul wrap itself in darkness majestically as in a garment. Another
friend has positive, emphatic hands which show great pertinacity of
opinion. She is the only person I know who emphasizes her spelled words
and accents them as she emphasizes and accents her