From the manner in which a woman draws her thread at every stitch of her needlework, any other woman can surmise her thoughts.

Balzac suggests that minute, habitual gestures—here, the tension and rhythm with which a woman draws thread while sewing—betray inner life. The claim is less about needlework itself than about the legibility of character in embodied practice: concentration, impatience, anxiety, or calm can register in the hand before they are admitted in words. By adding “any other woman,” the line also points to a gendered social world in which women, often confined to domestic tasks, develop acute skills of observation and inference within those spaces. The remark fits Balzac’s broader realist interest in reading society through physical detail, while also reflecting the period’s assumptions about women’s roles and the interpretive scrutiny directed at them.