I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no interest in the
spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the poor. She could have
found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance of want; but her fancy, in
some directions so alert, had never a throb of response for any sign of
the sordid. The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one
relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed,
more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most
diffused.

She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with her
gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into the
immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.
Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure; and in
this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a philosophy of her
own, all made up of her private notations and cynicisms. It was a
striking part of the business, for example, that it was much more the
women, on the whole, who were after the men than the men who were after
the women: it was literally visible that the general attitude of the one
sex was that of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and
attenuating, while the light of her own nature helped her more or less to
conclude as to the attitude of the other. Perhaps she herself a little
even fell into the custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating only for
gentlemen from her high rigour about the stamps. She had early in the
day made up her mind, in fine, that they had the best manners; and if
there were none of them she noticed when Captain Everard was there, there
were plenty she could place and trace and name at other times, plenty
who, with their way of being "nice" to her, and of handling, as if their
pockets were private tills loose mixed masses of silver and gold, were
such pleasant appearances that she could envy them without dislike.
_They_ never had to give change--they only had to get it. They ranged