Early in The Wings of the Dove, Kate Croy's Aunt Maud Lowder and Milly Theale's chaperone, Susan Shepherd Stringham, have a conversation about Merton Densher. In the words of Aunt Maud, whose “money and morality” make her the novel's embodiment of institutionalized judgment, Densher is “not good enough for my niece, and he's not good enough for you.” Densher is a journalist and would-be novelist, who has been raised “in strange countries, in twenty settlements of the English” and educated always “at the smallest cost, in the schools nearest; which was also a saving of railway fares” (p. 115). Although Mrs. Lowder and Mrs. Stringham decide to leave “in question – what Merton Densher ‘in himself’ was,” he does fall definitively outside of the “great man” that Mrs. Lowder wants Kate to marry (pp. 327, 109). The novel repeatedly emphasizes that the wealthy Mrs. Lowder would accept as “great” a man who possesses either money or public status. Densher's problem is that he possesses neither.

Densher, as James writes, is “at all events, not the man wholly to fail of comprehension.” He recognizes that “it was the plain truth: he was – on Mrs. Lowder's basis, the only one in question – a very small quantity” (p. 109). But by the close of the novel, as Kate informs him, he's “squared” Aunt Maud (p. 461).