ABSTRACT
When the necessary resolution has been taken and Strether's return journey has been fully determined, the rituals of departure, of cutting the ties, are set in motion. The final book is a sequence of conversations that both provide a closure with its formal character, and cast a light back over the action as a whole. One aim is clearly to cover whatever necessary bleakness with the appropriate politeness, to give the sense of loss a suitable elegance and civilized frame. The process has indeed begun with the arrival of the Pococks, after which Strether has, as James's scenario of 1900 says, `a kind of moral and intellectual drop or arrest ± of the whole range of feeling that has kept him up hitherto ± which makes him feel that his work is done, that his so strange, halfbitter, half-sweet experience is at an end'. He also mentions in the scenario the prefiguring of departure: the bell of the steamer, the curtain of the play.9
