All this was true; and yet while Stephen looked into them over the Governor's outstretched hand, he told himself that they were the most human eyes he had ever seen.

Afterward, when he groped through his vocabulary for a more accurate description, he could not find one.

There was shrewdness in Gideon Vetch's eyes; there was friendliness; there was the blue sparkle of contagious humour--a ripple of light that was like visible laughter--but above all there was humanity.

Though Stephen did not try to grasp the vivid impressions that passed through his mind, he felt intuitively that he had learned to know Gideon Vetch through his look and manner as well as he should have known another man after weeks or months of daily intercourse.

Whatever the man's private life, whatever his political faults may have been, there was magic in the clasp of his hand and the cordial glow of his smile.
He was always responsive; he stood always on the same level, high or low, with his companion of the moment: he was as incapable of looking up as he was of looking down; he was equally without reverence and without condescension.