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 conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or reputation, as when in The Descent of Man an eminent scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent to “popular” science, or as when in The Verdict a fashionable painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at best he can never do but third-rate work.  Some such stress of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Wharton’s stories of love, which make up the overwhelming majority of her work.  Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coincident with flawless matrimony.  It cuts violently across the boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it suffers tragic changes in the objects of its desire.

What opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs. Wharton prefers to represent?  Either its behavior must be furtive and hypocritical or else it must incur social disaster.  Here again Mrs. Wharton will not be partizan.  If in one story—­such as The Long Run—­she seems to imply that there is no ignominy like that of failing love when it comes, yet in another—­such as Souls Belated—­she sets forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when individuals take love into their own hands and defy society.  Not love for itself but love as the most frequent and most personal of all the passions which bring the community into clashes with its members—­this is the subject of Mrs. Wharton’s curiosity and study.  Her only positive conclusions about it, as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love cuts deepest in the deepest natures and yet that no one is quite so shallow as to love and recover from it without a scar.  Divorce, according to her representations, can never be quite complete; one of her most amusing stories, The Other Two, recounts how the third husband of a woman whose first two husbands are still living gradually resolves her into her true constituency and finds nothing there but what one husband after another has made of her.