30). Like her frank gaze (“she avoided neither his eyes nor those of any one else; she blushed neither when she looked at him nor when she saw that people were looking at her” [p. 28]), Daisy covets the electric possibilities of direct connection. When Winterbourne questions the wisdom of her intention to speak to her Italian suitor, Giovanelli, in a public park, she immediately replies, “Do I mean to speak to him? Why, you don’t suppose I mean to communicate by signs?” (p. 39). For Daisy, communicating by signs would be the equivalent of trailing a curator around a museum: Both would frustrate her desire for immediate participation in the unpredictable possibilities of the real. She thus rejects Winterbourne’s abstract devotion to honor and gallantry, insisting instead on the candor and volatility of original, local experience. To Winterbourne’s lurid insinuation that she has been “walk[ing] about the streets” with her Roman beau, Daisy responds with vibrant literalism: “About the streets? ... Where then would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio is not the streets, either” (p. 48).

In insisting on “a little fuss,” Daisy rejects Winterbourne’s empty iconoclasm. Whereas Mrs. Costello’s nephew plans his most spontaneous gestures and daydreams in set pieces, Daisy relies on the capricious dynamics of flirtation. In this respect, James’s heroine exposes what Chris Castiglia has called “a skeptical space within conventional commitments” (Castiglia, “The Genealogy of a Democratic Crush,” p. 210). By challenging those customs that demand the sacrifice of local loyalties to the seemingly greater good of “abstract national allegiance,” flirtation “opens ... a realm of practical democracy” (Castiglia, p. 209). It contests the conservative true democrat’s allegiance to contractual institutions like religion, law, social etiquette, and representational politics, and instead requires “the operation of trust on a local and contingent basis” (Castiglia, p. 211 ).

Winterbourne himself acknowledges that flirtation is a loaded and potentially subversive activity. “Little American flirts,” he silently observes, are “the queerest creatures in the world” (p. 49). “He had known, here in Europe, two or three women—persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability’s sake, with husbands—who were great coquettes—dangerous, terrible women, with whom one’s relations were liable to take a serious turn” (p. 14). Yet despite this amusing hyperbole, Winterbourne’s observations only partly account for the “fearful, frightful” potential of the flirt (p. 48). Daisy’s playful, narrative-defying “prattle” and her circular, coquettish habit of “going round” undermine the linear link between cause and effect. Refusing to speculate on the future, she focuses instead on the inchoate pleasures of the here and now.

Daisy’s insistence on seeing the Colosseum by moonlight draws its dramatic force precisely from such participative urges. The Roman ruin, the scene of an ancient culture’s violent sport, grounds the narrative in the rough-and-ready world of visceral engagement. Despite his exhilarated discovery of Daisy’s compromised state—she is, after all, alone with a man near midnight—Winterbourne cannot renounce his habit of “cautious criticism” (p. 58).