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the Heyman Center of the Humanities of Columbia University. He previously was a professor of government at Columbia University (1966-1979), a deputy assistant secretary in the U. S. Department of State (1979-1980), and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. (1980-1996). He is the author or editor of sixteen scholarly books, and he continues to lecture widely in the United States and abroad.
    Notes to the Introduction
    1. F. O. Matthiessen, Henry James: The Major Period, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1945.
    2. William James to Henry James, letter dated May 4, 1907, in The Letters of William James, edited by Henry James, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920, vol. 2, p. 278.
    3. James made this comment in a letter to Mrs. Cadwalader Jones, dated October 23, 1902; reprinted in The Wings of the Dove, Norton Critical Edition, second edition, edited by J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, New York, W. W. Norton, 2003, p. 468.
    4. The idea of the ficelle is discussed most extensively by James in the preface to The Ambassadors (see Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by Richard P. Blackmur, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937, pp. 307-327). The discussion in James’s preface to Wings is also of interest in this connexion (see The Art of the Novel, pp. 46-47).
    5. John Auchard, Silence in Henry James: The Heritage of Symbolism and Decadence, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986; especially chapter 5 on The Wings of the Dove.
    6. Henry James, “Is There a Life After Death,” in In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life, New York and London, Harper and Brothers, 1910, pp. 201-233.
    7. The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, New York, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 696-697.

VOLUME I

BOOK FIRST

—I—
    S he waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. It was at this point, however, that she remained; changing her place, moving from the shabby sofa to the armchair upholstered in a glazed cloth that gave at once—she had tried it—the sense of the slippery and of the sticky. She had looked at the sallow prints on the walls and at the lonely magazine, a year old, that combined, with a small lamp in coloured glass and a knitted white centre-piece wanting in freshness, to enhance the effect of the purplish cloth on the principal table; she had above all from time to time taken a brief stand on the small balcony to which the pair of long windows gave access. The vulgar little street, in this view, offered scant relief from the vulgar little room; its main office was to suggest to her that the narrow black house-fronts, adjusted to a standard that would have been low even for backs, constituted quite the publicity implied by such privacies. One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room—the hundred like it or worse—in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really in a manner that she mightn’t add the shame of fear, of individual, of personal collapse, to all the other shames. To feel the street, to feel the room, to feel the table-cloth and the centre-piece and the lamp, gave her a small salutary sense at least of neither shirking nor lying. This whole vision was the worse thing yet—as including in particular the interview to which she had braced herself; and for what had she come but for the worst? She tried to be sad so as not to be angry, but it made her angry that she couldn’t be sad. And yet where was misery, misery too beaten for blame and chalk-marked