which during a few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but
poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the woman he
loves, and then condemns him to one of the most appalling expiations in
fiction--to a slavery in comparison with which his former life was
almost freedom. Not since Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New
England soil a tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the
bondage of local color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton here handles her
material not so much like a quarryman finding curious stones and calling
out about them as like a sculptor setting up his finished work on a
commanding hill.

It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton has attracted the
most attention, and yet her short stories are of a quite comparable
excellence. About fifty of them altogether, they show her swift,
ironical intelligence flashing its light into numerous corners of human
life not large enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far
afield as to the ascetic ecstasies and agonies of medieval religion, in
_The Hermit and the Wild Woman_; or as to the horrible revenge of Duke
Ercole of Vicenza, in _The Duchess at Prayer_; or as to the murder and
witchcraft of seventeenth-century Brittany, in _Kerfol_. _Kerfol_,
_Afterward_, and _The Lady's Maid's Bell_ are as good ghost stories as
any written in many years. _Bunner Sisters_, an observant, tender
narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes of two
shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's age of innocence.

For the most part, however, the locality and temper of Mrs. Wharton's
briefer stories are not so remote as these from the center of her
particular world, wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the
crucial mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars are
likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate ideal is in