As we saw in Chapter 1, James's 1882 visit to the United States had been marked by the death of his mother. A year later, James was called back to wintry Cambridge, Massachusetts to bury his father. After the funeral, he stayed on as his father's executor and tried to keep busy. In the spring of 1883, he went to Washington, where he had met Wilde the year before. He visited Henry and Marian Adams again, but this time there was no worry, as there had been on James's previous visit, that he would ‘bring his friend Oscar Wilde’ since Wilde had by then taken up residence in Paris.

From Washington, James wrote to the publisher James R. Osgood to describe his latest projects, many of which involved impressionism. There was a collection of travel writings he proposed to call ‘Impressions of Art and Life’ or ‘Superficial Impressions’, and a short story titled ‘The Impressions of a Cousin’. James's return to Washington brought still a third item to mind, ‘an episode in the lives of a group of contemporary “aesthetes”, the former American, the other “international” ’ (L2 414). He detailed the prospective story as: