To locate a moral centre of gravity in Lili is to begin to see how Foreign Bodies stands in a relationship of criticism towards The Ambassadors, as well as a relationship of affectionate imitation. If James's novel dramatises a process of moral emancipation, a journey from the closed and absolute values of Woollett to the nuanced and ambiguous situations of Paris — from, that is, Victorianism to pragmatism— then Foreign Bodies is set in a world which has paid the devastating reckoning for that moral glissade. The impact of the First World War on James is well-understood — it was a body-blow to the ideal of a European culture he had so scrupulously documented, for better or worse, in so many novels. Accordingly it was a reversal as much aesthetic as ethical.  It is difficult to imagine what of James's moral and aesthetic worlds could have survived the atrocities and systematic barbarisms of the Second World War.

Yet Lili, for all her bitterly-won attachment to simple truth, and the superior discernment she derives from this allegiance, is complicated in her turn by the "difference" of Bea. She too has to welcome and accommodate the "foreign body" which at first distresses, then releases, and ultimately strengthens. When Bea, to protect Julian, tells a lie about the state his demented mother was in before her death, Lili both senses the lie and approves the motive: "How good you are!" she exclaims. This is just the latest in a whole series of deceptions Bea has practised in the course of the novel.  She is educated into the pragmatism which the novel as a whole views askance, and yet the novel eventually rewards her for this.  She climbs clear of earlier commitments, notably to her husband, and as a result, in the closing words of the novel, "In the long, long war with Leo, wasn't it Bea who'd won?" It is a conclusion hard to place: the calculated return of Jamesian sophistication, or the blurring of focus which arises from powerful themes which have to some extent escaped the control of the author?

Foreign Bodies in its own unexpected way also conforms to and displaces the "dreadful little old tradition" that "people's moral scheme does break down in Paris". In the way that it both embraces and critically remodels that tradition, it can without inappropriateness be compared to The Ambassadors. Like that triumph of the late phase of James's career, the intricate construction of Foreign Bodies is a demonstration of a "process of vision" as it disrupts the order of time to show how perception and judgment travesty truth. Its narrative of artfully delayed clarification exemplifies and vindicates the confession of unqualified literary faith with which James concluded the preface to his own tale, when he explained that the "moral involved" was "not that the particular production before us exhausts the interesting questions it raises, but that the Novel remains still, under the right persuasion, the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms."