“The Age of Innocence” has a much narrower range but it cuts deeper into life. The book is a direct arraignment of Puritan respectability. Irene Olenska, the heroine, married a European husband, like Mme. de Treymes, and found him unfaithful. She returned to her native land to live, too late. She developed a new soul abroad and she found herself totally alienated from her native surroundings. Europe made her natural and instinctive and American respectability rises up in arms against her. America is no longer a place for her to grow in. So poor Irene exits and lets the Puritans have the right of way. Mrs. Wharton’s literary method is far from being Freudian. To pass from her novels to those of Sherwood Anderson is like traveling to a different hemisphere. She chose for herself the rule of clearness and objectivity at any cost. And yet, she contributed a great deal to the exploration of the American conscience. She was the first to complain about the spiritual and moral indigence of her own characters. People in her novels can be divided into two different classes. We meet the behaviorists and the Freudians, those whose whole life develops on the surface and those whose secret actions remain buried in the subconscious. Her books are particularly rich in remarks on the sexual complex which, according to her, makes women in America superior, intellectually and morally, to men. She discusses at length the problem of American happiness. She indicts behaviorism in practice. She denounces the reduction of American ethics to a mere science of external actions and reactions. She shows her characters deprived of foresight or consistency in conduct. Calculation is their only standard of behavior. _Libido_ and _ambitio_, love and greed, sum up their elementary psychology. People in her books live without a real moral background. She tells us that they ignore the divinities which, under the surface of our passions, forge for the dead fatal weapons. Morally speaking, they are uprooted. They improvise their life. They make a quick response to external _stimuli_ and drift on the eddying surface of existence without knowing where to cling. Of Lily Bart, the heroine of “The House of Mirth,” we are told that she had grown without having any tie on earth dearer to her than another. She ignored traditions and could draw from them neither strength for herself nor tenderness for others. The past had not crystallized slowly into the very drops of her blood. No image of an ancient house full of memories lingered in her eyes. She had no idea of another house, of a _maison_ built not by hands but by hereditary devotions. She was not aware of the fact that only the past could broaden and deepen our individual lives by tying them mysteriously to all the accumulated human efforts.