Logan gave the book a rave, if a funny, ornery one.

It has long been taken for granted that the elements of Mr. James’s novels shall be few and simple, the characters and phases of life typical. Nobody expects anything to happen, or anticipates emotional excitement … If that wisdom was disturbed ever so slightly [by The Princess Casamassima, of 1886] The Reverberator will reestablish it triumphantly. The manuscript of the plot could be packed neatly in a nutshell, or a summary thereof engraved by an ingenious person on a dime …

She goes on to call it “exceptional.”

And by letter, James’s brother William was enthusiastic as well—and he was not always the first with praise. “I quite squealed through it, and all the household has amazingly enjoyed it,” he wrote. “It shows the technical ease you have attained, that you can handle so delicate and difficult a fancy so lightly. It is simply delicious.”

As for the rest of us, the young girls in search of high society and the greedy journalists and the terrible rich people who own newspapers, not much has really changed. Certainly in New York City, it all seems to come around again and again. On the front page of the same New York World that contained poor May McClellan’s charming Italian diary, there ran a story with the hysterical headline “ARE THE RICH GROWING POORER?” “There is great poverty and much unseen suffering in New York, beyond doubt,” it noted. “But it is a city imperial in wealth and luxury.” The story went on, about the art, the jewels, the newly rich, the “waters studded with pleasure yachts, floating palaces.” In the end, the answer to the headline, as it is to almost every question in a headline, turned out to be “no.” But wouldn’t it fit just perfectly on the front of the Times’ “Style” section today?

I

“I GUESS MY DAUGHTER’S IN HERE,” THE OLD man said, leading the way into the little salon de lecture. He was not of the most advanced age, but that is the way George Flack considered him, and indeed he looked older than he was. George Flack had found him sitting in the court of the hotel (he sat a great deal in the court of the hotel), and had gone up to him with characteristic directness and asked him for Miss Francina. Poor Mr. Dosson had with the greatest docility disposed himself to wait upon the young man: he had as a matter of course got up and made his way across the court, to announce to the personage in question that she had a visitor. He looked submissive almost servile, as he preceded the visitor, thrusting his head forward in his quest; but it was not in Mr. Flack’s line to notice that sort of thing. He accepted the old gentleman’s good offices as he would have accepted those of a waiter, murmuring no protest for the sake of making it appear that he had come to see him as well. An observer of these two persons would have assured himself that the degree to which Mr. Dosson thought it natural that any one should want to see his daughter was only equalled by the degree to which the young man thought it natural her father should find her for him. There was a superfluous drapery in the doorway of the salon de lecture, which Mr. Dosson pushed aside while George Flack stepped in after him.

The reading-room of the Hôtel de l’Univers et de Cheltenham was not of great proportions, and had seemed to Mr. Dosson from the first to consist principally of a bare, highly-polished floor, on which it was easy for a relaxed elderly American to slip. It was composed further, to his perception, of a table with a green velvet cloth, of a fireplace with a great deal of fringe and no fire, of a window with a great deal of curtain and no light, and of the Figaro, which he couldn’t read, and the New York Herald, which he had already read. A single person was just now in possession of these conveniences—a young lady who sat with her back to the window, looking straight before her into the conventional room. She was dressed as for the street; her empty hands rested upon the arms of her chair (she had withdrawn her long gloves, which were lying in her lap), and she seemed to be doing nothing as hard as she could. Her face was so much in shadow as to be barely distinguishable; nevertheless as soon as he saw her the young man exclaimed—“Why, it ain’t Miss Francie—it’s Miss Delia!”

“Well, I guess we can fix that,” said Mr. Dosson, wandering further into the room and drawing his feet over the floor without lifting them. Whatever he did he ever seemed to wander: he had a transitory air, an aspect of weary yet patient non-arrival, even when he sat (as he was capable of sitting for hours) in the court of the inn. As he glanced down at the two newspapers in their desert of green velvet he raised a hopeless, uninterested glass to his eye. “Delia, my dear, where is your sister?”

Delia made no movement whatever, nor did any expression, so far as could be perceived, pass over her large young face.