supposable 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 have been a residuum of
difference; such a sister having surely known in respect to such a
brother the extremity of separation, and such a brother now feeling 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 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. He joined his guide in an instant, and then felt she
had profited still better than he by his having been for the moments
just mentioned, so at the disposal of her intelligence. She knew even
intimate things about him that he hadn't yet told her and perhaps never
would. He wasn't unaware that he had told her rather remarkably many
for the time, but these were not the real ones. Some of the real ones,
however, precisely, were what she knew.

They were to pass again through the hall of the inn to get into the
street, and it was here she presently che