For all reply to this sally he received a stare of undisguised amazement from Miss Garland, who then looked across at Mrs. Hudson with a glance which plainly said:  “You see he ’s quite the insidious personage we feared.”  The elder lady, however, sat with her eyes fixed on the ground and her two hands tightly clasped.  But touching her Rowland felt much more compassion than resentment; her attitude was not coldness, it was a kind of dread, almost a terror.  She was a small, eager woman, with a pale, troubled face, which added to her apparent age.  After looking at her for some minutes Rowland saw that she was still young, and that she must have been a very girlish bride.  She had been a pretty one, too, though she probably had looked terribly frightened at the altar.  She was very delicately made, and Roderick had come honestly by his physical slimness and elegance.  She wore no cap, and her flaxen hair, which was of extraordinary fineness, was smoothed and confined with Puritanic precision.  She was excessively shy, and evidently very humble-minded; it was singular to see a woman to whom the experience of life had conveyed so little reassurance as to her own resources or the chances of things turning out well.  Rowland began immediately to like her, and to feel impatient to persuade her that there was no harm in him, and that, twenty to one, her son would make her a well-pleased woman yet.  He foresaw that she would be easy to persuade, and that a benevolent conversational tone would probably make her pass, fluttering, from distrust into an oppressive extreme of confidence.  But he had an indefinable sense that the person who was testing that strong young eyesight of hers in the dim candle-light was less readily beguiled from her mysterious feminine preconceptions.  Miss Garland, according to Cecilia’s judgment, as Rowland remembered, had not a countenance to inspire a sculptor; but it seemed to Rowland that her countenance might fairly inspire a man who was far from being a sculptor.  She was not pretty, as the eye of habit judges prettiness, but when you made the observation you somehow failed to set it down against her, for you had already passed from measuring contours to tracing meanings.  In Mary Garland’s face there were many possible ones, and they gave you the more to think about that it was not—­like Roderick Hudson’s, for instance—­a quick and mobile face, over which expression flickered like a candle in a wind.  They followed each other slowly, distinctly, gravely, sincerely, and you might almost have fancied that, as they came and went, they gave her a sort of pain.  She was tall and slender, and had an air of maidenly strength and decision.  She had a broad forehead and dark eyebrows, a trifle thicker than those of classic beauties; her gray eye was clear but not brilliant, and her features were perfectly irregular.  Her mouth was large, fortunately for the principal grace of her physiognomy was her smile, which displayed itself with magnificent amplitude.  Rowland, indeed,