...of a judge of character

Robboe stopped at his machine, picked up a piece of finished work, and checked its size carefully with a micrometer.
Arthur paused while turning the capstan. ‘All right?’ he asked belligerently.
Robboe, always with a cigarette in his mouth, blew smoke away from his eyes, and ash fell on to his brown overall-coat. He made the last measurement with a depth-gauge. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Nothing wrong’ - and walked off.
Arthur and Robboe tolerated and trusted each other. The enemy in them stayed dormant, a black animal stifling the noise of its growls as if commanded by a great master to lie low, and animal that had perhaps been passed on for some generations from father to son on either side. They respected this lineage in each other, recognised it when they asked or answered tersely the few brusque questions that passed between them speaking with loud mouths and passionless eyes.
Robboe had a car - admitted, an ancient Morris - and a semi-detached in a posh district, and Arthur held these pretensions against him because they were basically of equal stock, and he would therefore have felt friendlier had Robboe lived in the same kind of four-roomed house as himself. For Robboe was in no way better than him, he ruminated, spinning the turret and lightly applying its chamfer-tool to one of the last dozen cylinders of the day, and no better than anybody else if it came to that. Arthur did not assess men on their knowledge or achievement, but by a blind and passionate method that weighed their more basic worth. It was an emotional gauge, always accurate when set by him, and those to whom it was applied either passed or did not pass the test. Within the limits of its narrow definitions he used it as a reliable guide as to who was and who was not his friend, and up to what point he could trust a person who might become his friend.
So when Arthur looked at a man, or heard the inflexion in his voice, or saw him walk, he made a snap judgement that turned out to be as accurate as one made after weeks of acquaintance. His first assessment of Robboe had never altered. In fact it had gained ground. His half-conscious conclusions proved to him that no one man was better than the other in this particular case, that they shared with plain openness a world of enmity that demanded a certain amount of trust. And Arthur did not doubt that Robboe had applied a similar test to him, with the same conclusions. So the respect they had for each other was based on a form of judgement that neither could give words to.

[Saturday NIght & Sunday Morning, Stilltoe, A.]