Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by John Lavery, Spencer Gore and William Orpen. An American millionaire and his daughter buy an Italian prince and an English collection, and the prince has a past with the daughter's closest friend, who then marries the millionaire. Four people, one flaw in a gilded crystal bowl, and four hundred pages in which almost nothing is said outright. James dictated it to a typist and considered it the best proportioned thing he had done. Sixty plates of Venice and its waterways, from Canaletto to James Tissot, run alongside a novel where four lives drift on a single flaw.