In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the restraint of her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors of the satirist. Xingu, for instance, with its famous opening sentence—­“Mrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pursue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet alone”—­has the flash and glitter, and the agreeable artificiality, of polite comedy.  Undine Spragg and the many futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the novelist’s gallery.  It is only in these moments of satire that Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition:  her impatience with stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her toleration of arrogance when it is high-bred.  Such qualities do not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of comedy.  Lucidity, detachment, irony—­these never desert her (though she wrote with the hysterical pen that hundreds used during the war).  So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism at arm’s length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the barbarians.  If she had a little less of this pride of dignity she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the societies about which she writes.  Decorum, after all, is binding chiefly upon those who accept it without question but not upon passionate or logical rebels, who are always shattering it with some touch of violence or neglect; neither does it bind those who stand too securely to be shaken.  For this reason the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her characters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of artistic effect.  She multiplies them as romancers multiply adventures.

The illusion of reality in her work, however, almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements.  Compared to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom she resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exuberance and richness of texture, but she has more intelligence than he.  Compared to Jane Austen, the novelist among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton most resembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is the more impassioned of the two.  It may seem at first thought a little strange to compare the vivid novels of the author of The House of Mirth with the mouse-colored narratives of the author of Pride and Prejudice, for the twentieth century has added to all fiction many overtones not heard in the eighteenth.  But of no other woman writer since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of Mrs. Wharton that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true tower of irony.