PREFACE
to poor little dim and archaic Daisy Miller, say; the note, so to call it, of multitudinous reference. I had had, for any confidence, to make it out to myself that my little frisking haunter, under private stress, of the New York public scene, was related with a certain intensity to the world about her; so that her case might lose itself promptly enough in a complexus of larger and stranger cases—even in the very air, by what seemed to promise, of the largest possibillties of comedy. What if she were the silver key, tiny in itself, that would unlock a treasure?—the treasure of a whole view of manners and morals, a whole range of American social aspects?
To put that question was to see one's subject swell at its mere touch; but to do this, by the same stroke, was to ask one's self, alas, how such a majestic mass could be made to turn round in a nouvelle. For, all tainted with the up-town debility though it still might be—and this too, after all, comparative—didn't it yet strain the minor key, to re-employ my expression, almost to breaking? How had the prime idea come to me, in the first place, but as possibly and perhaps even minutely illustrating, in respect of consequences and remoter bearings, that freedom repeatedly to contract for the fond preliminaries of marriage which has been immemorially cherished by the American female young? The freedoms of American life are, together with some of its queer restrictions and timidities, the suggestive matter for painter, poet or satirist; and who should say that one of the greatest of all such birthrights, the large juvenile license as to getting "engaged," disengaged and re-engaged, had received half the attention the charmed dramatist or moralist would appear consistently to owe it? Presumably of the greatest its bearing on the social tone at large, on the manners, habits and ideals of communities cling-
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