. . . the chance to overflow into my favorite occupation of rewriting as I read, such fiction as--I can read. I took this liberty in an inordinate degree with Eleanor--and I always feel it the highest tribute I can pay. I recomposed and reconstructed her from head to foot--which I give you for the real measure of what I think of her. I think her, less obscurely--a thing of rare beauty, a large and noble performance, rich, complex, comprehensive, deeply interesting and highly distinguished. I congratulate you heartily on having _mené à bonne fin_ so intricate and difficult a problem, and on having seen your subject so wrapped in its air and so bristling with its relations. I should say that you had done nothing more homogeneous, nor more hanging and moving together. It has Beauty--the book, the theme and treatment alike, is magnificently mature, and is really a delightful thing to have been able to do--to have laid at the old golden door of the beloved Italy. You deserve well of her. I can't "criticize"--though I _could_ (that is, I _did_--but can't do it again)--rewrite. The thing's infinitely delightful and distinguished, and that's enough. The success of it, specifically, to my sense is Eleanor, admirably sustained in the "high-note" way, without a break or a drop. She is a very exquisite and very rendered conception. I won't grossly pretend to you that I think the book hasn't a weakness and rather a grave one, or you will doubt of my intelligence. It _has_ one, and in this way, to my troubled sense: that the anti-thesis on which your subject rests isn't a real, valid anti-thesis. It was utterly built, your subject, by your intention, of course, on one; but the one you chose seems to me not efficiently to have operated, so that if the book is so charming and touching even so, that is a proof of your affluence. Lucy has in respect to Eleanor--that is, the image of Lucy that you have tried to teach yourself to see--has no true, no adequate, no logical antithetic force--and this is not only, I think, because the girl is done a little more _de chic_ than you would really have liked to do her, but because the _nearer_ you had got to her type the less she would have served that particular condition of your subject. You went too far for her, or, going so far, should have brought her back--roughly speaking--stronger. (Irony--and various things!--should at its hour have presided.) But I throw out that more imperfectly, I recognize, than I should wish. It doesn't matter, and not a solitary reader in your millions, or critic in your hundreds, will either have missed, or have made it! And when a book's beautiful, nothing _does_ matter! I hope greatly to see you after the New Year. Good night. It's my usual 1.30 A.M. Yours, dear Mrs. Ward, always, HENRY JAMES.