An example of Henry James at his best - and worst

Chapter 42 of Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady" is a perfect example of everything that is great - and horrible - about James's style. This chapter takes place entirely within the mind of Isabel Archer, as she sits before a dying fire in her drawing room and ruminates on everything that has gone wrong in her terrible marriage to Osmond. It's as powerful, profound, sorrowful a view of a ruined marriage as you will ever read. The writing is elegant and original and plays to James's strengths in that these slight nuances of feeling and emotion are poked and prodded and turned around every which way until Isabel has a full understand of the dire nature of her condition. It's perfect James. And yet: nothing happens. We watch Isabel's mind at work, but we do not see her do anything other than sit before the fire and think. So James is the perfect exemplar of one of the "beginner's rule" of fiction: write what you know. He knows only a very narrow social milieu, one type of character in one particular setting (the idle rich, Europe) and he writes about that exclusively and at times exquisitely. James, however, violates the other cardinal rule: show, don't tell. He shows us Isabel's view of her marriage but he never gives us any of the scenes in which we can see for ourselves why the marriage is horrible (he does have some nasty dialogue between Isabel and Osmond). The horror of the marriage is mediated by Isabel's thinking and by James's narration. He gets by with this because what he does he does so well, but it also explains why so many find James unreadable. As to Isabel, by this point in the novel she is playing such a complicated game - telling Pansy that she must obey her father's will while secretly and subtly manipulating events so that Pansy will reject Warburton and leave the field clear for her beloved Rosier - that it's hard to keep up. Her machinations are as complex as one of James's sentences, and you just want to say can't anyone in this novel be straightforward and just say what they mean?