Is it she who cannot change, or has change not been so sweeping as it first appeared? And insofar as standards have altered, have they altered for the better: is the easygoing attitude Leila and her friends adopt toward their own marriages really a sign of “progress”? Can it be that the notorious Mrs. Lidcote can find some sort of happiness now? The story raises all these questions and more, but readers must formulate the answers for themselves.
“The Last Asset,” yet another story concerning the aftermath of divorce, focuses not upon the divorcing couple, but principally upon the child—lovely Hermione Newell. Hermione’s mother—brash, coarse-minded, and unscrupulous—has come to the conclusion that her daughter is her “last asset,” the last valuable item Mrs. Newell has to offer the world in exchange for readmittance. If the daughter marries into a distinguished, highly respectable family, her mother will once again have some “place” in society. Thus Mrs. Newell is passionately concerned to have Hermione marry the Comte Louis du Trayas, a young man who has proposed to her, but whose family looks upon the marriage with misgivings. Wharton’s story is narrated from the point of view of a disinterested outsider, Paul Garnett, to whom Mrs. Newell has appealed for assistance in bringing the negotiations to a successful conclusion. At first, Garnett is merely repelled by the mother’s callous attitude toward her innocent, likable child. What possible good could be served, he wonders, by sacrificing Hermione in this way? Yet as the story moves along, he begins to realize that the situation is vastly more complicated that he has supposed. The young woman and her suitor appear to be genuinely in love, and the repugnant errand upon which the mother has sent him takes on a somewhat different tone. Probably no clear moral definition of his role is possible. If he aids Mrs. Newell in her unscrupulous use of the girl, he will bear some responsibility for the triumph of tawdriness: the mother’s ruthless use of Hermione will go unpunished—will indeed be rewarded. If he refuses aid, the girl herself might suffer terribly. The story concludes, then, not with a tidy answer, but with a series of questions, both for Garnett and for the reader.
Superbly skilled in dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implication of social constrictions, Wharton not infrequently allows a short story to conclude with just such uncertainties as those that can be found in this collection. This tactic is one evidence of her skill as a writer: the dilemmas that she examines are not time-bound—not limited to the world of America’s upper classes in the early twentieth century. They are dilemmas that beset all human beings and haunt all social arrangements. The explicit components of any given problem may differ from person to person and from age to age. Yet the fundamental configuration of the problem will remain the same. Wharton’s ability to locate that configuration and to probe its timeless implications is the measure of her lasting achievement as an artist.
Roman Fever
I.
FROM the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval.
As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below. “Well, come along, then,” it cried, not to them but to an invisible companion, “and let’s leave the young things to their knitting”; and a voice as fresh laughed back: “Oh, look here, Babs, not actually knitting—” “Well, I mean figuratively,” rejoined the first. “After all, we haven’t left our poor parents much else to do . . .” and at that point the turn of the stairs engulfed the dialogue.
The two ladies looked at each other again, this time with a tinge of smiling embarrassment, and the smaller and paler one shook her head and coloured slightly.
“Barbara!” she murmured, sending an unheard rebuke after the mocking voice in the stairway.
The other lady, who was fuller, and higher in colour, with a small determined nose supported by vigorous black eyebrows, gave a good-humoured laugh. “That’s what our daughters think of us!”
Her companion replied by a deprecating gesture. “Not of us individually. We must remember that. It’s just the collective modern idea of Mothers. And you see—” Half guiltily she drew from her handsomely mounted black hand-bag a twist of crimson silk run through by two fine knitting needles. “One never knows,” she murmured.
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