Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry James

Henry James is doing that classic late-19th-century trick: sounding like he’s delivering a calm social observation while quietly sharpening the blade. The sentence begins as a diagnosis of class entitlement - young men who “never do anything for themselves” if delegation is available - but the real sting is in the mechanism that props them up. It’s not merely servants or inherited money. It’s other people’s belief. James stacks the nouns - “infatuation, the devotion, the superstition” - to suggest a spectrum from ordinary attraction to something almost religious, as if these men survive on a kind of social incense burned in their honor.

Then comes the pivot: “These others...are women.” It lands less like an empirical claim than an indictment of a system that recruits women as the emotional infrastructure of male privilege. James isn’t flattering women’s influence; he’s naming the trap. “Superstition” implies a collective delusion: the culturally trained habit of overestimating certain men, excusing their incompetence, laundering their selfishness into charm or promise. The “ninety-nine cases out of a hundred” is deliberate hyperbole, the rhetorical swagger of someone mimicking the certainty of social gossip while exposing how routinely this pattern repeats.

Context matters: James writes from an era when “doing” was coded masculine, yet much of the unpaid labor required to keep status afloat - organizing, soothing, admiring, sacrificing - was pushed onto women and then romanticized. The subtext isn’t that women are foolish by nature; it’s that the culture makes their devotion predictable, and certain men learn to treat that predictability as a resource.