An Ohio family - a judge, his wife, and a daughter recovering from an unsuitable attachment - is taken to Europe to get over it, and the Atlantic and the Dutch canals do not much help. Howells edited The Atlantic and was the most powerful literary broker in America; this 1902 novel is his quiet study of ordinary decent people being wrong about their own children, and the father is beautifully done. Fifty-eight plates of family portraits and harbor scenes by Homer, Chase and their peers, from Vermeer to Bellows, echo the novel's domestic crossings.