Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton teaches literature and writing classes at Southwestern University. She writes frequently about the short story. In this essay she suggests that Margaret's evasive idealism is at fault for her inability to understand herself and others.

Since Ellen Glasgow used her short stories as a way of practicing new techniques and developing themes, the best of the stories possess the density and richness of her fully-formed novels, and they measure up to the work of her better known contemporaries such as Henry James. Critics generally agree that "The Difference" is one of Glasgow's best and that its drawing-room setting is reminiscent of James's "The Beast in the Jungle." One of the themes that "The Difference" articulates, according to many readers, is woman's moral superiority to man's. But to read the story as a tale of moral superiority—as if that is the main difference between...