her plot. The distillation and watering are admirable. (By watering I mean the employment, instance by instance, of the material of her earlier work.) Among good things I note only the high dramatic sense which, after the two have parted, conveys to us through Nick, and not through Susy, the vital information that Streff has surprisingly inherited and is therefore the natural upward step for her; the reader unconsciously supplies and savours the drama which is never related of Susy's response to the news. Or the superb dénouement, prepared for with a masterly certainty and delicacy, of Susy's discovery that the hostess for whom she made her great false step was the unknown adulteress who dispossessed her at Como. One remembers with a positive thrill that Strefford, the owner of the villa, had with embarrassment given a jewel to Mrs Vanderlyn's little girl; one sees brilliantly that the money came from Mrs Vanderlyn's paramour; one sees why the discovery makes it impossible for Susy to marry Strefford. It is the magic of technique. It is not quite enough.
The strange thing is that the theme is worthy of Mrs Wharton; it isn't in any sense cheap, or sentimental, or thin. Isn't it, essentially, the theme, too, of The House of Mirth where, though Lily is dead, the word passes between them which makes all things irrevocably right? Why then the extraordinary sensation of Mrs Wharton's own scepticism concerning the whole affair? Why does one feel so sure that she was unsure, believe that she did not at all believe? Why didn't the demands of her theme make themselves clear to an artist who has always shown so responsive a mind to the requirements of form? I can only suspect that she sets small store by the felicity which her protagonists have and lose and win again; and being unwilling to treat the subject with irony she treats it (in another sense of the word) with contempt. Or is this, possibly, Mrs Wharton's final comment on the happy ends of men's lives?
