Tone is everything in The Ambassadors (1903): it is the very subject of the novel. Strether has to mediate, like James in his letters from Paris to his family at home in the 1870s, Old World sophisticated moeurs for New World decencies. Is there a tone he can find – playful? ironic? appealing? – in which he can reconcile a Sarah Pocock or a Mrs Newsome with a Mme de Vionnet? Will he be able to make out a language in which the one can imagine the other? All those thick missives he dispatches across the Atlantic represent his sincere effort to translate the one tone-world into another; to bring about, by his own sheer efforts of imagination-in-language, their mutual transparency.

It is in the very nuances of his language, too, that he stands most accused by Sarah of defection (like the younger Henry accused by William James of ‘French tricks’ in his letters): the crimson spots burn brighter in her cheeks and she is – significantly – lost for words when he tries on her his little galanterie, his sample of ‘how Parisians could talk’: