but they did not go to war. They lacked, it seemed, the capacity to mobilize.They behaved like animals, in that respect; or like women. They did not behave like men, or ants.

 I saw at last that I was missing another signal. Damning his effeminate deviousness, I said,
"Are you trying to tell me, Lord Estraven, that you're out of favor with the king?"

The guards were seldom harsh and never cruel. They tended to be stolid, slovenly, heavy, and to my eyes effeminate—not in the sense of delicacy, etc., but in just the opposite sense: a gross, bland fleshiness, a bovinity without point or edge.

. Thus as I sipped my smoking sour beer I
thought that at table Estraven's performance had been womanly, all charm and tact and lack of
substance, specious and adroit.

 Argaven smiled at that, a stretched, staring grin. He laughed shrilly like an angry woman
pretending to be amused

 thought, shivering, that
there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat.

His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.

 Ignorant, in the Handdara sense: to ignore the abstraction, to hold fast to the thing. There was
in this attitude something feminine, a refusal of the abstract, the ideal, a submissiveness to the
given, which rather displeased me.

 In an hour or so the boy (he had a girl's quick delicacy in his looks and movements, but no girl
could keep so grim a silence as he did) came to tell me that the Lord of Estre would receive me
if it pleased me to come.