Confidence

A painter, his friend, and a girl at Baden-Baden — one man asks the other to inspect her and report whether she will do as a wife, and the report changes both their lives. James wrote this in 1879 between the early tales and the great novels; it is his lightest study of the thing he never stopped examining, which is what happens when a man delegates his own judgment to somebody else. Sixty plates by painters including Tissot and Renoir follow the story's women through shops, gardens and parlours, matching James's eye for the figures a man watches but never truly knows.