The pathos of Henry James’ career, the secret of his chiaro-oscuro and of his twilight effects can be heard ringing in this quotation. He never became truly reconciled to his solitude at Rye in Sussex. He remained a Puritan at heart. For a Puritan conscience every ship across the sea, west or east bound, is still and always will be the _Mayflower_. He began by surveying the American scene. His first novels, “The Madonna of the Future,” “Roderick Hudson,” “Daisy Miller,” were very different in technique from his later productions. They were straightforward, obvious and simple, with very little psychoanalysis, and few literary detours or arabesques. They did not go round and round. Still, James had already managed to force his favorite point in favor of the American uprooted abroad and he had already procured the American virgin a passport to European disillusions. As an expert in the psychology of women, only Hawthorne had shown an equal sense of innuendoes. Had James been a woman, he would have made an ideal chaperone. How deftly and delicately he took his angels abroad to comfort them and guide them in their exile! How he liked to use them as what he called a reverberator in his stories! How he grilled them, coaxed them into a sort of psychological trance! There was something mesmeric and Palladinian[13] in his approach to women. In his books women are more ghostly than real. Has any one of them ever had a real body of her own? They are all so pre-Raphaelite! In place of a body they have a soul. Like Fra Angelico’s seraphs they are encumbered with wings, “wings of the dove,” a poetic but a most inefficient apparel for globe-trotters. James’ heroines could not flap their wings in their crude utilitarian country. (Imagine one of his angels lost in Dreiser’s “A Hoosier Holiday!”) And neither can they adapt themselves to the Old World. Their transcendental ethics are so out of keeping with real life that it unfits them for existence. How pure they are, how idealistic, how naïve and shy! Daisy Miller, the representative American virgin abroad, is a martyr added by James to the Christian calendar. She is the Sainte Blandine of American fiction. James brought her into the limelight to emphasize the tragic longing of her sisters for Europe. She embodied the tragic conflict of Puritan conscience and European paganism, the same conflict which Hawthorne dramatized in “The Marble Faun.” Una, in Hawthorne’s novel, was a foster-sister to Daisy in her fear of the flesh and of the devil.