English Kate Croy is getting ready to teach American Milly Theale a lesson, but she starts off by situating Milly’s ignorance.

It seemed at least — the American mind as sitting there thrilled and dazzled in Milly — not to understand English society without a separate confrontation with all the cases. It couldn’t proceed by — there was some technical term she lacked until Milly suggested both analogy and induction, and then, differently, instinct, none of which were right: it had to be led up and introduced to each aspect of the monster, enabled to walk all around it, whether for the consequent exaggerated ecstasy or for the still more — as appeared to this critic — disproportionate shock. It might, the monster, Kate conceded, loom large for those born amid forms less developed and therefore no doubt less amusing; it might on some sides be a strange and dreadful monster, calculated to devour the unwary, to abase the proud, to scandalize the good; but if one had to live with it one must, not to be for ever sitting up, learn how: which was virtually in short tonight what the handsome girl showed herself as teaching.

As it turns out, what Kate Croy wants to tell Milly Theale is that Milly is too good for the Brits amongst whom she seeks to establish herself. But this passage in particular made me remember reading that James Baldwin had a project he never wrote about Henry James, and that it had something to do with the distinctly American inability to see other cultures. In this passage, those other cultures have monstrous forms of their own that Kate wants to show to her friend.

As it turns out, if in Kate’s eyes English society is a monster that has to be understood to be lived with, Milly is a dove. The effect of one of Milly’s words on one of the many complicated situations in this novel is described (p.186) as having “made the air heavy once more with the extravagance of assent.” Dovelike, indeed.