Daisy Miller by Henry James Fiction Classics

<p><strong>It was in Rome during the autumn of 1877; a friend then living there but settled now in a South less weighted with appeals and memories happened to mention -- </strong>which she might perfectly not have done -- some simple and uninformed American lady of the previous winter whose young daughter a child of nature and of freedom accompanying her from hotel to hotel had picked up by the wayside with the best conscience in the world a good-looking Roman of vague identity astonished at his luck yet (so far as might be by the pair) all innocently all serenely exhibited and introduced: this at least till the occurrence of some small social check some interrupting incident of no great gravity or dignity and which I forget I had never heard save on this showing of the amiable but not otherwise eminent ladies who weren't in fact named I think and whose case had merely served to point a familiar moral; and it must have been just their want of salience that left a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying in such connections Dramatize dramatize! The result of my recognizing a few months later the sense of my pencil-mark was the short chronicle of DAISY MILLER. -- Henry James</p>