iate, exclusive
address to their friend was like a lamp she was holding aloft for his
benefit and for his pleasure. It showed him everything--above all her
presence in the world, so closely, so irretrievably contemporaneous with
his own: a sharp, sharp fact, sharper during these instants than any
other at all, even than that of his marriage, but accompanied, in a
subordinate and controlled way, with those others, facial, physiognomic,
that Mrs. Assingham had been speaking of as subject to appreciation.
So they were, these others, as he met them again, and that was the
connection they instantly established with him. If they had to be
interpreted, this made at least for intimacy. There was but one way
certainly for HIM--to interpret them in the sense of the already known.

Making use then of clumsy terms of excess, the face was too narrow and
too long, the eyes not large, and the mouth, on the other hand, by
no means small, with substance in its lips and a slight, the very
slightest, tendency to protrusion in the solid teeth, otherwise indeed
well arrayed and flashingly white. But it was, strangely, as a cluster
of possessions of his own that these things, in Charlotte Stant, now
affected him; items in a full list, items recognised, each of them, as
if, for the long interval, they had been "stored" wrapped up, numbered,
put away in a cabinet. While she faced Mrs. Assingham the door of the
cabinet had opened of itself; he took the relics out, one by one, and it
was more and more, each instant, as if she were giving him time. He saw
again that her thick hair was, vulgarly speaking, brown, but that there
was a shade of tawny autumn leaf in it, for "appreciation"--a colour
indescribable and of which he had known no other case, something that
gave her at moments the sylvan head of a huntress. He saw the sleeves
of her jacket drawn to her wrists, but he again made out the free arms
within them to be of the completely rounded, the polished slimness that
Florentine sculptors, in the great time, had loved, and of which the
apparent firmness is expressed in their old silver and old bronze. He
knew her narrow hands, he knew her long fingers and the shape and colour
of her finger-nails, he knew her special beauty of movement and line
when she turned her back, and the perfect working of all her main
attachments, that of some wonderful finished instrument, something
intently made for exhibition, for a prize. He knew above all the
extra