"Eugene Pickering" by Henry James Eugene Pickering has lived his entire life in the shadow of an overbearing and inflexible father. After he died, he traveled to Europe with the idea of ​​staying on the old continent for six months. A few days after arriving in Hamburg, the first stage of his trip, when he begins to feel a "feverish sensation of liberation", he receives a letter from the father of the young woman with whom he has been engaged since they were children. Convinced that the letter means the end of his newly released freedom, he decides not to open it and asks his friend, the narrator, to keep it until he asks for it.