out so well; it enlarges the comedy of it that its pathos is so
essential to the action. Even the most comic things have their tears.

_August 1921._


2. EDITH WHARTON

At the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in a mood of reaction
from current snobbism, discovered what he called the Four Million; and
during the same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton
rediscovered what she would never have called the Four Hundred. Or
rather she made known to the considerable public which peeps at
fashionable New York through the obliging windows of fiction that that
world was not so simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but
uninstructed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors reputed to
characterize the great, she testified on almost every page of her books,
lay certain arcana which if much duller were also much more desirable.
Those splendors were merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the
authentic inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an
American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of
their native continent.

Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington
Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its
inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically
engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has
exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive,
and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely
shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade