All 16 Uses of

subtle
in
The Portrait of a Lady

One could answer such a question beautifully, doubtless, if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one's imagination.†
Chpt Pref.

They are typical, none the less, of a class difficult, in the individual case, to make a centre of interest; so difficult in fact that many an expert painter, as for instance Dickens and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as that of R. L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted.†
Chpt Pref.

But, as he said to himself, he had no intention of disamericanising, nor had he a desire to teach his only son any such subtle art.†
Chpt 5

It was as if somehow she had all society under contribution, and all the arts and graces it practised—or was the effect rather that of charming uses found for her, even from a distance, subtle service rendered by her to a clamorous world wherever she might be?†
Chpt 19

The truth is that the moment she had crossed the threshold she received an impression that Mr. Touchett's death had had subtle consequences and that these consequences had been profitable to a little circle of persons among whom she was not numbered.†
Chpt 20

It was as graceful on Henrietta's part to believe that Mr. Bantling took an interest in the diffusion of lively journalism and in consolidating the position of lady-correspondents as it was on the part of his companion to suppose that the cause of the Interviewer—a periodical of which he never formed a very definite conception—was, if subtly analysed (a task to which Mr. Bantling felt himself quite equal), but the cause of Miss Stackpole's need of demonstrative affection.†
Chpt 20

It was moreover a seat of ease, indeed of luxury, telling of arrangements subtly studied and refinements frankly proclaimed, and containing a variety of those faded hangings of damask and tapestry, those chests and cabinets of carved and time-polished oak, those angular specimens of pictorial art in frames as pedantically primitive, those perverse-looking relics of medieval brass and pottery, of which Italy has long been the not quite exhausted storehouse.†
Chpt 22

If he had not been shy he wouldn't have effected that gradual, subtle, successful conversion of it to which she owed both what pleased her in him and what mystified her.†
Chpt 24

Keen as was her interest in the rugged relics of the Roman past that lay scattered about her and in which the corrosion of centuries had still left so much of individual life, her thoughts, after resting a while on these things, had wandered, by a concatenation of stages it might require some subtlety to trace, to regions and objects charged with a more active appeal.†
Chpt 27

But she no sooner became conscious of these things than her imagination was hushed with horror at the idea of taking advantage of the little girl—it was of this she would have accused herself—and of exhaling into that air where he might still have a subtle sense for it any breath of her charmed state.†
Chpt 30

Everything he did was pose—pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse.†
Chpt 39

The finest—in the sense of being the subtlest—manly organism she had ever known had become her property, and the recognition of her having but to put out her hands and take it had been originally a sort of act of devotion.†
Chpt 42

He would give no sign now of an inward rage which was the result of a vanished prospect of gain—not the faintest nor subtlest.†
Chpt 46 *

This subtle modulation marked a momentous discovery—the perception of an entirely new attitude on the part of her listener.†
Chpt 52

Definitions:

(1) (subtle as in: a subtle poison)
working in an indirect or hidden way
(2) (subtle as in: a subtle shade of blue)
understated so as not to draw excess attention
(3) (subtle as in: a subtle difference or thinker)
not obvious, but noticeable with enough insight and knowledge

or:

able to notice or understand things that require insight and sensitivity