hat love cuts deepest in the
deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and
recover from it without a scar. Divorce, according to her
representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing
stories, _The Other Two_, recounts how the third husband of a woman
whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into
her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after
another has made of her.

In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of
her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. _Xingu_,
for instance, with its famous opening sentence--"Mrs. Ballinger is one
of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous
to meet alone"--has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable
artificiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many futile women
whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of
enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the
satirist as to the novelist's gallery. It is only in these moments of
satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her
impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind
and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when
it is high-bred. Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare,
clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such
qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy
with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of
comedy. Lucidity, detachment, irony--these never desert her (though she
wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war). So
great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm's length,
somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians. If she had a little
less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to
assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the
societies about which she writes. Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly
upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or
logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence
or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be
shaken. For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of
inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her
characters are in part an illusion deftly employed