Marathe & Steeply, the undercover protocols — "The feminine manner to examine the…"
The feminine manner to examine the fingernails was to raise the whole hand’s back into view instead of malely curling the nails in over the upturned palm; Marathe recalled knowing this from a very young age.
Context
Disguise is mastered at the grain of the gesture. Not the wig or the dress but the fingernail-check has a gendered protocol — back-of-hand up, not palm-up-and-curled — and the scene turns on whether Steeply has the discipline for these thousand micro-tells. (Elsewhere the tell fails: 038 also shows him flicking ash "with a coarse thumb-gesture that was not yet feminine.") Concealment-craft is revealed as an accumulation of tiny bodily disciplines, and Marathe, who "recalled knowing this from a very young age," reads Steeply's mastery of them like a scorecard — the disguise judged not at the mask but at the hands.