In the third chapter of The Ambassadors (1903), Strether, Waymarsh and Maria Gostrey go window-shopping. While Strether finds that the beguiling Chester displays make him ‘want more wants’, finds indeed, that he desires ‘things that he shouldn’t know what to do with’, Waymarsh limits his interest to ‘the merely useful trades’, piercing with ‘sombre detachment the plate-glass of ironmongers and saddlers’. The friends’ respective approaches to consumption indicate their different relations to puritan asceticism, but also summarize the unprecedented commercial developments that occurred during James’s lifetime. Whereas Waymarsh’s attitude at this point can be identified with capitalism’s industrial phase, in which the emphasis was on production and the procurement of goods was predominantly a matter of necessity, Strether belongs to the new consumer age in which shopping has become a leisure activity and the locus of multiplying desires. During the second half of the nineteenth century the first department stores appeared and proceeded to expand steadily, both in size and range of merchandise, and the strategies of selling became increasingly sophisticated and omnipresent. Lambert Strether – whose adventure of self-exploration begins with uneasiness and dissatisfaction before a hotel mirror, allayed only by the thought of opportunities for acquisition that await him in London – is one illustration of James’s acute apprehension of the significance of consumption in the construction of national, social and gender identities, and in the formation of modern subjectivities.