the suspicion that she is a dea ex machina. Her practice of tact on every occasion, as the most artificial thing about her, is the mark for ironical animadversions on the part of her author; but her delicate impartiality and the imaginative quality of her judgment command respect. She is unique among even the more eminent of Mrs. Wharton's social critics in combining so exact a capacity for estimation and characterization with apparently so little temptation to use it ironically. By heredity, by environment, by the force of her own temperament she was with the enemies of John Ambherst; yet she understood him as none of them did, certainly as the delicately sarcastic old Mr. Langhope-did not. Mr. Langhope was, in fact, even in his silences and omissions, critical to the point of satire; he is not the cleverest of Mrs. Wharton's characters, but he is nearly as typical as any, for he has the generally cool and ironically detached attitude, such as Miss Bart had for the wealthy and stupid Percy Gryce, or as Justine Brent had for Westy Gaines. The security of such an attitude lies in the knowing that one's own sense of fitness is adequate; and of this they are, properly no doubt, sure. These superior persons are distinguished in their field of social criticism, which, if it is transient, is yet an art.
The element of critical detachment contributes traceably to produce the acute definition characteristic of Mrs. Wharton's art. The fiction of few contemporary writers has so much distinctness; it is like that produced by many touches of a fine abrasive or a dilute acid. The edges may sometimes come out too sharp, as in The Custom of the Country and the most sardonic of her short stories; but if she does not stop this side satire, if she does not always avoid angularity, she does achieve distinctness. Indeed Summer, her latest novel, but one, gives countenance to the idea that the direction of her art is permanently toward impersonal distinctness as the one merit. Apparently her former virtues of fineness, which so well offset the marble-like qualities of her art, are sacrificed to bringing out the edges, which are as clear and hard as those of Kipling at his hardest; it is a not too pleasing change from carving in social ivory to graving in sociological steel. The reader will regret to find that this is the end apparently toward which the acuity of her stories points, though his regret will not be that steel engraving is without worth but that it fs worth considerably less than carving. The subject of her fiction has never before been so utterly harsh, or the dis-
