It was a touch that gave the note of the familiar--the intimate and the belated--to their quiet colloquy; and it was indeed by some such trivial aid that Strether became aware at the same moment of something else.

The observation was at any rate determined in him by some light too fine to distinguish from so many others, but it was none the less sharply determined.

Chad looked unmistakeably during these instants--well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth.

Our friend had a sudden apprehension of what that would on certain sides be.

He saw him in a flash as the young man marked out by women; and for a concentrated minute the dignity, the comparative austerity, as he funnily fancied it, of this character affected him almost with awe.
There was an experience on his interlocutor's part that looked out at him from under the displaced hat, and that looked out moreover by a force of its own, the deep fact of its quantity and quality, and not through Chad's intending bravado or swagger.