A Vermont girl of no family is taken up by a rich woman as a companion and carried to Italy — where the arrangement, and everyone's exact idea of what she is owed, comes apart. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1899 novel is his quietest anatomy of patronage, and the girl's refusal to be grateful on cue is the whole book. Fifty-three plates after Winslow Homer and Giovanni Boldini follow the peasant girls, wells, and small Italian villages that surround the companion's story.
