"And just what is a journal? A novel with the narrator, 'I'? Henry James disapproved of these; he said that they limited the tale to what the narrator could observe. The greater drama, according to him, was to see the observer observing." Auchincloss clearly has literary wisdom- and a keen reader...
My favorite story in this collection is "Gemlike Flame." Young Peter Westcott is abroad in Venice, rounding off his education on the Continent as young men and women did in those days, when he calls upon his older cousin Clarence "Clarry" McClintock who is abroad as an erstwhile painter and esthe...