He marveled at “how absolutely, how inordinately, the Isabel Archers, and even much smaller female fry, insist on mattering,” and acted as if he was some kind of visionary for even thinking of writing a whole book about someone like that. I started to feel the combined annoyance and exhilaration that sometimes came over me on airplanes. You could tell that Henry James wasn’t actually dumb, or a jerk. So how didn’t he realize he was sounding like a jerk?
