ton's characters, shows ultimately the same infallibility of feeling, as her friend the rapid Mrs. Fisher so convincingly testified. "I don't know what to make of her," that lady said; "she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing the seed, and then when it comes time to harvest she either oversleeps herself or goes on a picnic. . . . Sometimes I think it is because she at heart despises the things is working for." Miss Bart's power of criticism was indeed very coolly impartial and played over her wealthy acquaintances and herself alike; she knew them and knew herself, and saw their errors and her own with desperate clarity. But however she might menace one aspect of herself with another, her fineness with her cleverness, she did, in spite of herself, "save herself whole from the wreck of her life."
Mrs. Wharton's characters are nearly all preoccupied with that great feat; and some of them, indeed, do so save themselves. Sophy Viner was "ardently honest" with herself and made it the great point of her life to be true to her memory of Darrow. Darrow did not fail to attempt the repair of that breach in his integrity which the indulgence of the gentleman's code had permitted; and it was due to the fineness of their textures and finish if the fragments of his identity repelled further decay when their principle of cohesion was so largely destroyed. John Amherst and Lawrence Selden, Ralph Marvell and Raymond de Chelles are so evidently saved whole that they are saved from the dulness of cold overstabililty only by their distinction and serious cleverness. The subtly acute drama of Sanctuary lies in the saving whole of the fine feeling which Mrs. Peyton had instilled into her son Richard, whose lack of natural fineness had been inherited from his father. Indeed, the likelihood is that they will all be saved whole, for they are protected from excess by the power of their self-criticism; they know themselves; they think with ability and toward the end of preserving their integrity of feeling. Perhaps they have learned their high lessons too well; their fineness is sometimes accompanied by coolness and they are not in- frequently critical to the point of satire.
When the question is less of their self-critical quality than of general social judgment, the reader readily remembers the accomplished detachment of Mrs. Ansell. The individual distinction that she achieves through her lens-like social insight—she is not surpassed in this point even by the great Miss Bart—is sufficient nearly to lay
