story) that some years ago he proposed to the lady in white sitting opposite to them; a curio dealer calls on a lady in Portland Place just to wind up the plot. But the great glow at the back, the emotional conflagration, is always right. _The Europeans_ (1878) marks the first time when Mr James took the international situation as a joke, and he could joke very happily in those days when his sentence was a straight young thing that could run where it liked, instead of a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls. There is no other book by Mr James which has quite the clear, sunlit charm of this description of the visit of Eugenia, the morganatically married Baroness, and her brother Felix, the Bohemian painter, to their cousins' New England farm. There is nothing at all to their discredit in the past of these two graceful young people, but they resemble Harlequin and Columbine in the instability of their existence and the sharp line they draw between their privacy and their publicity. It appears to them natural that the private life should be spent largely in wondering how the last public appearance went off and planning effects for the next, a point of view which arouses the worst suspicions in their cousins, who are accustomed to live as though the sky were indeed a broad open eye. So Felix has the greatest difficulty in persuading his uncle, who takes thirty-two bites to a moral decision, just as Mr Gladstone took thirty-two bites to a mouthful, that he is a suitable husband for his cousin Gertrude; and poor Eugenia fails altogether in an environment where a lie from her lips is not treated as _un petit peche d'une petite femme_, but remains simply a lie. The frame of mind this state of affairs produces in the poor lady is exquisitely described in a passage which shows her going wistfully through the house of the man who did not propose to her because he detected her lie, after a visit to his dying mother.