On either side of her walked her father and mother, each of them showing a visage almost as blighted as her own.”

Crawford, instead, marries unsuitably, and, having lost his fortune, becomes prey to his wife, who pushes him down a set of steps, thus breaking his leg. The narrator believes that he can never go back to her, but, like Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, which James began a few years after the composition of “Crawford’s Consistency,” he returns to his spouse, renouncing the possibility of easy freedom.

“An International Episode,” a sort of companion piece to Daisy Miller, which had appeared six months earlier, was first published in the Cornhill Magazine in December 1878 and January 1879. Two young Englishmen, one the heir to a title and a fortune, come to New York; they experience the city in the stifling heat of summer. They are great blank creations, almost stupid at times, alert only to their own station and the newness and strangeness of the New World. The hot summer allows James to follow the routine he had already developed in “A Most Extraordinary Case” and make the city a site to begin the story but not a place where a story could unfold. Their contact in New York, J.L. Westgate, is one of James’s few creations who actually has a job, who puts in a full day at the office. Westgate’s wife and sister-in-law are at Newport, and the reader can feel James itching to remove his two young men from the “sinister hum of mosquitoes” in the sinister and inhospitable city, to Newport, away from the world of J.L. Westgate and his money-making activities to the world of leisure and American women, led by Westgate’s sister-in-law Miss Alden. These women are forward, intelligent, charming, curious and opinionated, ripe for a young English lord, who is used to more stuffy company, to fall in love with.

Miss Alden is Daisy Miller’s opposite. She is too intelligent to be doomed; if she breaks the rules, it is due to her genuine lack of respect for them rather than any weakness. The English are seen in the story as snobbish, thoughtless, bad-mannered, a race on whom everything is lost. The Americans are democratic and hospitable. When the story appeared, it was roundly attacked by Mrs. F.H. Hill, the wife of the editor of the Daily News, whom James knew socially in London. “Mrs. Hill,” Leon Edel writes, “accused James of caricaturing the British nobility, and of putting language into its mouth which it would never utter. Henry on this occasion replied, since he knew the lady, the letter is a magisterial defense of his work and his art. It is the only letter extant that he ever wrote to a reviewer.”

“A man in my position,” James wrote to Mrs. Hill,

and writing the sort of things I do, feels the need of protesting against this extension of his idea in which, in many cases, many readers are certain to indulge. One may make figures and figures without intending generalizations—generalizations of which I have a horror. I make a couple of English ladies do a disagreeable thing—cela c’est vu: excuse me!—and forthwith I find myself responsible for a representation of English manners! Nothing is my last word about anything—I am interminably supersubtle and analytic and with the blessing of heaven, I shall live to make all sorts of representations of all sorts of things. It will take a much cleverer person than myself to discover my last impression—among all these things—of anything. And then, in such a matter, the bother of being an American! Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, even with their authoritative talents, were free to draw all sorts of unflattering English pictures, by the thousand. But if I make a single one, I am forthwith in danger of being confronted with a criminal conclusion—and sinister rumours reach me as to what I think of English society. I think more things than I can undertake to tell in 40 pages of the Cornhill. Perhaps some day I shall take more pages, and attempt to tell some of these things; in that case, I hope, there will be a little, of every sort, for every one! Meanwhile I shall draw plenty of pictures of disagreeable Americans, as I have done already and the friendly Briton will see no harm in that!—it will seem to him part of the natural fitness.”

On January 4, 1879, James wrote about the matter to his friend Grace Norton in Boston: “You may be interested to know that I hear my little ‘International Episode’ has given offence to various people of my acquaintance here. Don’t you wonder at it? So long as one serves up Americans for their entertainment it is all right—but hands off the sacred natives. They are really I think, thinner-skinned than we!” Two weeks later, James wrote to his mother: “It seems to me myself that I have been very delicate; but I shall keep off dangerous ground in the future.”

Later that year, when he published his book on Hawthorne, James discovered that Americans could also be thin-skinned.