She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in …

James concentrates our attention at the beginning of The Wings of the Dove, as he did at the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, on the striking figure of a handsome girl dressed in black; appropriately so, since this is the novel in which he returns to the theme of that earlier girl rashly ‘affronting her destiny’ and gives it what he himself would call an extra turn of the screw. Like Portrait, this is to be a novel about betrayal, and it begins with the sick familiar taste of distrust and frustration and the recoil of physical disgust.

She waited, Kate Croy …

The inversion in those opening words tells us that the action has already become wearisome to the actress long before the rise of the curtain reveals her to the audience. It speaks too of her determination not to be defeated. The place where she waits, the ‘vulgar little room’, in which her senses cringe away from contact with any of the surfaces – ‘slippery’, ‘sticky’, ‘sallow’, ‘wanting in freshness’ – which surround her, is the outward embodiment of the relationship which holds her there, her relationship with her father. Only one surface is a release from the oppressive grip of that relationship: the tarnished surface of the mirror. As she gazes into it, the reader, looking over her shoulder, sees her face.