lem had risen before him: if he was to abandon America he must have another field, and where was that field to be found? . . . There was, to be sure, the world of his fellow-expatriates, the little world of the "colonies" and the tourists who, like himself, were adrift in Europe. The Henrietta Stackpoles, the Daisy Millers, the Christopher Newmans—how vastly amusing they were! He saw them with the acute receptivity of a fellow-voyager, so to speak, on shipboard: does one ever see people quite so acutely, quite so memorably, as in that relation? How startling was the contrast between these innocents abroad and the ornate, the established background against which they moved and shifted! And how well prepared he was to enter into their "predicament," their thoughts and their sensations! But after all he possessed here a very limited domain; he could survey it, he could grasp it in all its aspects, in a few months—and what then? Did not this parasitical world indeed presuppose, as it were, and all but inevitably pass one on to the "host" upon which it lived? It could not serve him for ever as a subject; he must have a more substantial, a more permanent world to represent. And in which direction was he to turn?
He found himself excluded on every side. "I feel for ever how Europe keeps holding one at arm's length," he wrote in one of his letters home, "and condemning one to a meagre scraping of the surface." And again: "What is the meaning of this destiny of desolate exile—this dreary necessity of having month after month to do without our friends for the sake of this arrogant old Europe which so little befriends us?" He had tested Italy, and he had found no one but "washerwomen and waiters," as he remarks, to talk to, waiters and sacristans and language-masters whom he had had to pay for their conversation. Where was the great world upon which his heart was set, or, rather, how was he to penetrate it? "Even a creature addicted as much to sentimentalizing as I am over the whole mise-en-scène of Italian life," he observes, "doesn't find an easy initiation into what lies behind it." And what, in sum, had even France yielded him? "A good deal of Boulevard and third-rate Americanism; few retributive relations otherwise." The Continent was closed to him. "I wondered of course who lived in them, and how they lived, and what was society in Altdorf," says the narrator of another of his early stories, referring to the old burgher mansions in a Swiss town through which he is passing; "longing
