Why Henry James's novels are both great and minute

Can you figure out what's going to happen in Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady"? We have jumped several years forward and now Isabel and Osmond are unhappily married - and Pansy is a very attractive, shy, sheltered marriagable daughter. A seemingly nice young man, Rosier, is in love with her and wants to ask for her hand - but Osmond is cruelly sarcastic and dismissive: Rosier is not wealthy enough. Madame Merle meddles, agrees to help Rosier, but which side is she on? Enter from the wings: Lord Warburton, into a drawing-room party at one of Isabel's "at home" days. Shall we guess that he falls in love with Pansy? That in an odd twist of fate Osmond becomes his champion, in that he's suitably rich? And that Isabel, who we are told always disagrees with her husband, takes up the case of Rosier. In a more modern setting, this would break up the marriage, but I'm not sure how that happens in James's world - my guess is a complete estrangement, but like the Touchett marriage - Isabel will go off on her own after being vanquished by her husband and Warburton. And that leaves one "suitor" unaccounted for - the hapless Caspar Goodwood (I love typing out that ridiculous name). I see him trailing Isabel around Europe like a puppydog. Well, I could be completely wrong. We've come a long way with these characters by this point in the book, and I feel we should know them better - the way we know a Tolstoy character - but James characters are wound so tight that we never see how they act other than in the drawing room. It's as if the whole world can be contained in within the inflections of civil conversation and discourse. It can't. James does a very small thing very well, but there's so much he misses. His novels are both great and minute.