There is nothing telepathic in her delineations. Her characters live on the ground floor of consciousness. Her novels are as clear and as unmysterious as Fifth Avenue on a Sunday morning after church. Contrary to Henry James, she dramatizes more than she appreciates. She is very deft in constructing a plot. Her method is classical and seems somewhat old-fashioned to-day. She is a realist in the old sense of the word. She praised Marcel Proust recently for knowing the art of incidents and the compliment may be returned to her. At a time when, in America as in Europe, fiction ceased to be rational to become instinctive, and when the novelists gave up the plot for introspection, she chose to travel the old road. Modern critics point to her flimsy psychology. They are shocked by her indifference to social or political problems. She sticks to high life at an epoch when historical developments take us back to primitive and almost paleolithic humanity. Fifth Avenue and “The House of Mirth,” with their flirts and divorcées, shrink to Lilliputian dimensions in comparison with our chaotic world since the War. Who cares about mésalliances or unhappy marriages when the universe looks like a big city after an earthquake or a flood? What do we care to know to-day how Mme. de Treymes will reconcile her faith to her unfaithful French husband with her longing for her American fiancé? In a similar manner the casuistry in “The Fruit of the Tree,” or “The Reef” seems almost antediluvian. In “The Custom of the Country,” “The Age of Innocence” and her four novelettes on Old New York, we cannot so easily dismiss Mrs. Wharton’s satire of American life and society at large.[16] Undine Spragg in “The Custom of the Country” is an impressive type of American adventuress. She is drawn from life and set against a suggestive American background. The three successive husbands of Undine embody the characteristic aspects of American society extremely well. The old, and now decrepit aristocracy, is represented by Ralph Marvell, an “undervitalized” scion of the New York gentry. Moffat stands for the advent of the masses, while Marquis de Chelles voices the protest of the Old World against the standards of the New. The Spragg family and Moffat would not be out of place in a novel by Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. As a psychologist Mrs. Wharton made a very impressive study of a double personality in Ralph Marvell.