She never knew true solidarity, outside of the brief and useless flirtations in which she wasted her energies in an uneven struggle against her brilliant but flimsy surroundings. All the people she knew were like her. They resembled some atoms blown away in a frantic whirlwind. After all, the characters in Mrs. Wharton’s novels show themselves to be victims of impulse. They react quickly but superficially to the challenge of existence. They pride themselves on being practical, self-reliant and self-controlled. They may be so in business, but not in ethics. To borrow a practical comparison, they are not _insured_ on life and no agency which knew them well would issue to them an insurance policy. Mrs. Wharton agrees with the majority of critics on this point. * * * * * Mrs. Wharton’s psychological insight revealed itself principally in “The House of Mirth.” Lily Bart revives Daisy Miller. She is another instance of inhibited and repressed womanhood. Endowed with a Freudian soul and a multiple personality, on the surface she is only a flirt, the “moth” of Victorian novelists, the “salamander” of the American satirists. To-day she would appear as a most courted “flapper.” But if we read her truly, Lily Bart is much more tragic. She is a saint on the wrong track. Hers is a romantic soul. All her life she has longed for the knight-errant who would rescue her from herself; he never came, because she was poor. Despite numerous escapades Lily is as pure as her name. Suicide, at the end of her short career, is a protection _in extremis_ against the world and against herself. It is a desperate means to reconcile by destruction her dual person. Mrs. Wharton has thrown a great deal of new light on the American complex regarding the sexes. She made a special study of the ill adaptation between man and woman in American society. If we believe her, Americans, and especially women, are the victims of an environment where all the romantic values of life have been upset and denied. Moral energies have turned to the outside entirely.