In his correspondence with Edith Wharton, Henry James represents himself as lacking in resources, flagging and failing, breathless in her triumphal wake. ‘Ah I'm conscious enough, I assure you, of going without, and of all the rich arrears that will never – for me – be made up – !’ It is his misfortune that he cannot keep up with her, his ‘ideal of the dashing Woman’; he can only ‘hang about [her] by the power of participation supersensual and devotional’. From the melancholy tranquillity of his bachelor quarters, Henry contemplates the splendours of Edith's Paris apartment, ‘hover[ing], like a too participant larbin, behind your Louis XIV chair (if it isn't, your chair, Louis Quatorze, at least your larbin takes it so)’; he cannot visit the rue de Varenne, ‘But, ah, how from the shelf I shall watch you on the Aubusson carpet!’

Henry was immensely fond of his ‘dearest Edith’, and with good reason: she was a loyal friend for fifteen years.