Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry James

Money is the kind of character Henry James loved most: omnipresent, unsentimental, and never quite named as the villain. In this line, he turns cash into a social force with impeccable manners. To "follow" money is to chase it, to let it set your pace and your morals; the word carries a whiff of servility, the grim hustle, the anxious calculation. "Meet" flips the posture. Now money arrives as if by introduction at a drawing room, a visitor you can receive with composure and even delight. The wit is that both positions depend on the same thing: a world where wealth organizes relationships, opportunities, and self-respect.

James was writing at the high tide of Gilded Age capitalism and transatlantic courtship plots, when American fortunes collided with European titles and "taste" often acted as a laundering agent for blunt economic power. His fiction is packed with people who insist they're above money while quietly orienting every decision around it. The sentence captures that hypocrisy with surgical economy: no sermon, just a tonal contrast that exposes the moral bookkeeping.

The subtext is not merely "greed is bad". It's that desire becomes socially acceptable when it can be rebranded as happenstance, inheritance, marriage, or luck. Chasing money is vulgar; benefiting from it is charming. James isn't absolving the pleasure of comfort. He's indicting the etiquette that makes predation look like destiny, and dependency look like refinement.