Like The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, this middle novel has a presiding symbol announced in its title, and makes its symbolism internally, through the characters’ creative effort. There are several capable of inventive and transformative ways with words: Kate Croy, Merton Densher, and Milly Theale are filters of consciousness through which we see the events and people of the novel. They are made to make the language which is medium and subject.

The imagery and lexis of the opening chapter are totally relevant to the novel: the heroine's self-inspection in the mirror, her divided gaze, beauty, and mourning, the squalor and small size of room and street, family deaths, dialogue between father and daughter, everything tells. The scene sets an environment, placing and motivating Kate's improvised scheming. She is a case of visible social shaping, determined to be a villain, in one of Richard III's meanings: not intending to be a villain, she adapts to soliciting circumstance. Like Christina Light and Marie de Vionnet, she is made by beauty and poverty into commodity. The power of market value is backed by persuasive circumstance – a friend in need, possessed of all the wealth Kate and her lover Merton Densher lack and want, dying to love before she dies.

When we put the novel down, Densher's acquiescence in Kate's plot may seem implausible, but on the page we slip with him, step-by-step, through the soliciting circumstances which encourage desire, submissions, then renunciation and change. The process is gradual, almost imperceptible, though towards the end not always crystal clear, as it moves from his complicity to his anger at Lord Mark. It is unmistakable in conclusion, as he refuses to take the bequest with the woman for whose sake he wanted the bequest.

This novel builds in blocks, dividing analytic narration between characters who create the terms in which action and judgement are articulated. Milly is the dove, in innocence, whiteness, softness, purity, spirituality, and flights of love and death. There is her well-known prototype, in James's young cousin Mary (Minny) Temple, who died of consumption at the age of 24, thirty years before he wrote the novel.