forthwith look together. It was almost as if she had been in
possession and received him as a guest. Her acquaintance with the
place presented her in a manner as a hostess, and Strether had a
rueful glance for the lady in the glass cage. It was as if this
personage had seen herself instantly superseded.

When in a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw,
what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the
lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and
something more perhaps than the middle age--a man of five-and-fifty,
whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face,
a thick dark moustache, of characteristically American cut,
growing strong and falling low, a head of hair still abundant
but irregularly streaked with grey, and a nose of bold free
prominence, the even line, the high finish, as it might have been
called, of which, had a certain effect of mitigation. 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