EDITH WHARTON'S NI!W YORKS
415
tion of the newcomer, absolutely vulgar and absolutely ruthless.
Everything happens to Undine, but nothing affects her. She marries
once for money, a second time for family and a third time for
money again, only to find in the end that her divorces will keep her
from being an ambassadress. And that, of course, is the only thing
that she ultimately wants.
The Custom of the Country
appeared in 1913, and the next
four years Mrs. Wharton devoted entirely to war work. Her main
job was with the Red Cross in Paris, but she visited military hospitals
at the front and from a cottage garden at Clermont-err-Argonne she
witnessed the victorious French assault on the heights of Vauquois.
But the "fantastic heights and depths of self-devotion and ardor, of
pessimism, triviality and selfishness," as she describes the war years,
did little more for her as a writer than they have done, in either war,
for many others. Their most important effect was to introduce a
note of nostalgia, an escape, as she describes it, to childhood memories
of a long-vanished America, to the "mild blur of rosy and white–
whiskered gentlemen, of ladies with bare sloping shoulders rising
flower-like from voluminous skirts, peeped at from the stair-top while
wraps were removed
in
the hall below." But this was the New York,
was it not, that she had found so stuffy and confining, that she had
shown in losing battle with the Spraggs and Rosedales and from
which she had fled to Europe?
It
was a New York, was it not, that
had been passive, inert, confining, a city that had almost deserved to
be eaten up by the new money of the energetic parvenu? Now,
however, that it was gone, really gone, she found herself looking about
and wondering
if
she had not gone too far in its condemnation. Much
later she was to confess:
When I was young it used to seem to me that the group in which
I grew up was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would
ever again be poured. Now I see that one of its uses lay in preserving a
- few drops of an old vintage too rare to
be
savored by a youthful palate.
Out of this sense of apology came
The Age of Innocence .
It
deals with a New York that is pre-Spragg and pre-Rosedale. New–
bold Archer
is
the young Whartonian of brownstone lineage, the
Marvell type, a lawyer, of course, with a leisurely practice and an eye
for books and pictures. He marries conventionally, and the story
