The Better Sort Book

In Broken Wings (1900) real artistic and financial success elude an artist, who, nonetheless, is the recipient of cruel tricks due to his assumed success. When his failure becomes publicly apparent, he is quietly dropped. The beautiful Lady Beldonald of The Beldonald Holbein makes a habit of engaging excessively plain female companions whose ugliness acts as a foil to her own attractiveness. In The Two Faces (1900) a lady who hopes to ensnare a Lord is instead asked by him to steer his innocent German wife through the labyrinth of London society. Painter Mary Tredrick, in The Tone of Time, produces from memory the portrait of a distinguished gentleman for one of her clients. The man was modelled after an old suitor who had deceived the artist. Alas, the same man had also deceived her client! Mrs. Medwin (1902), a well-constructed four-part morality farce, is a savage mockery of the hypocritical standards of the social set. In Flickerbridge (1902), an American visits the ancestral home of his fiancee's distant English cousin and falls in love with the place. Passivity, an absolute evil according to James, forms the basis to The Beast in the Jungle (1903) in which the author confesses that the ravaging anguish in a man's life consists not in what the man does, but in what he has failed to do-in his sins of omission. The involved and contrived plot of The Papers (1903) concern the manoeuvres of a gentleman publicized as being distinguished although he has accomplished absolutely nothing, and a dramatist who pines away for lack of publicity, making pathetic attempts to attract it.