Turning to Giovanelli, he remonstrates, “I wonder ... that you, a native Roman, should countenance such a terrible indiscretion.” The Italian’s reply, “Ah, ... for myself, I am not afraid,” highlights the difference between the two men. Whereas Giovanelli has imbibed Daisy’s radical ethic of personal agency (“when was the Signorina ever prudent?” he asks), Winterbourne relies on the true democrat’s system of political substitutions: “I am speaking for this young lady.” Daisy, however, insists on her own embodied self-determination: “I never was sick, and I don’t mean to be! ... I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy!” (p. 59). Unlike Mrs. Walker and her taxonomic collection of “diversely-born fellow-mortals,” Daisy treats herself and her friends as living, breathing human beings. Rejecting her country-woman’s bookish sensibilities, she focuses instead on the Roman’s physical charm: He is the “handsomest man in the world” (p. 36), the “beautiful Giovanelli” (p. 37).

Daisy’s insistence on Giovanelli’s tangible embodiment stands at odds with Winterbourne’s canned depictions of Daisy herself: She is either “a delicate young girl lounging away the evening in this nest of malaria” (p. 58) or “a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect” (p. 58). From this perspective, Winterbourne’s desire to know whether Daisy and Giovanelli are “engaged” takes on a great deal of significance. In glibly dismissing the matter—“it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!” (p. 59)—he implies that Daisy’s intimacy with the Italian has little to do with conventional professions of marital intent. For all of Winterbourne’s flippancy, however, the very fact that Daisy, on her deathbed, insists that “she never was engaged to that handsome Italian” (p. 60), underscores the importance of the question to the story’s outcome. Had she been formally engaged, Daisy would have put an end to the indeterminate and fundamentally playful dynamics that animated her status as a radical democrat. Instead of ceding her political options to a man—the ultimate chaperone for the nineteenth-century middle-class woman—Daisy embraces the flirtatious limbo that postpones the static certainty of marriage. “I have never allowed a gentleman to dictate to me, or to interfere with anything I do,” she insists (p. 39). Indeed, inasmuch as Daisy uses her parasol to transform public spaces into furtively private enclaves, so she equally converts abstract issues into material matters. After knowing Winterbourne for only a few days in Vevey, she “[made] it a personal matter that [he] should have left the place”—much to Mrs. Walker’s astonishment (p. 44). To borrow Castiglia’s formulation, Daisy “shift[s] the balance of power, making public spaces private, abstract functionaries familiar, powerful men needy, and abject citizens possessed of the power to satisfy a national hunger” (p. 211). While she is not engaged in a marital sense, she is deeply engaged in a political one.

Daisy’s death by malaria exposes the perils of this visceral type of democratic participation. In a story peppered with petty somatic complaints (Mrs.