In characterization Mrs. Wharton reveals the power not only to analyze subtly temperaments and motives, but also to describe vividly with a few words.  This phrasal power is illustrated when she says of Faxon that he “had a healthy face, but dying hands,” and of Lavington that “his pinched smile was screwed to his blank face like a gaslight to a whitewashed wall.”

THE TRIUMPH OF NIGHT

[Footnote:  From Scribner’s Magazine, August, 1914.]

I

It was clear that the sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had so confidently counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of nightfall and winter.

The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow fields and ice-hung forests.  It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black and white landscape.  Dark, searching, and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bullfighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts.  This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively temperate airs of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of Northridge.  George Faxon said to himself that the place was uncommonly well named.  It clung to an exposed ledge over the valley from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden sides of the station.  Other building there was none:  the village lay far down the road, and thither—­since the Weymore sleigh had not come—­Faxon saw himself under the immediate necessity of plodding through several feet of snow.

He understood well enough what had happened at Weymore:  his hostess had forgotten that he was coming.  Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for.  Yet to say Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was perhaps too crude a way of putting it.  Similar incidents led him to think that she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to telephone the coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed him) to drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on a night like this what groom who respected his rights would fail to forget the order?