[...] Only very late in the story, when she finally sheds tears for her dying cousin Ralph, can Isabel admit the folly his last illness brings home to her, seeing herself now not as subject but as object. For by this time she herself has experienced at the hands of Gilbert Osmond whatit is to be used and patronized. Osmond does consciously what Isabel has done unconsciously, subordinating the lives of those around him, including his own daughter, to a ruthless egotism masquerading as aristocratic exclusiveness. Isabel thus finds her dreams embodied in a parody of her own determination to spurn the cheap and the vulgar — and it is Osmond who eventually reveals to her how fatally her idealism is compromised by selfishness and self-delusion, in one of the earliest examples of the doubles and near-doubles who haunt so much of James’s later fiction.