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90 extensive, for though it ranges through two continents, it moves by an itinerary of drawing-rooms, and the unvarying terminus ad quem of its travels is a drawing-room. Its embodied images are indigenous to the drawing-room atmosphere, which, should they walk abroad, remains a fine aura about them, an air. The reader could hardly imagine the great Miss Bart "camping out," and would likely suspect that Undine Spragg's scorn of Apex City is the fruit of her first lessons in drawing-room perspective. The distinguished gentlemen and ladies in The Valley of Decision are at their best chiefly in noble drawing rooms; the soft panorama of northern Italy described in this novel is viewed evidently with an indoor eye. But this is only to say that Mrs. Wharton's imagination is subjugated by the definite taste of those "old families" whose traditional gentility is still fertilized by hereditary cleverness. The inveteracy of such taste is shown but too well in the mordant irony to which she subjects the merely fashionable section of her world of drawing-rooms. It is too sharp, not as satire, but as art, for its obvious extremity, to which she sometimes pushes it, is caricature. The reader who remembers the first abode of Undine Spragg in New York as the Hotel Stentorian may reasonably reflect that while two such names are well aimed darts at the socially ambitious of America, to spend much of one's skill in such marksmanship, is to deviate from the art of fiction.

And one is not long in concluding that these novels are too specialized to be the epic of America. They are not spacious enough, or populous, or noisy, or grandiloquent, or full enough of "energy divine," although they are powerful in their chosen direction. One is surprised to find in any of them the figure of a captain of finance, but not surprised that when he appears he is on a vacation and that the financial part of his life is lived elsewhere than in the story. Mrs. Wharton's treatment of what to Americans is the greatest of the passions is a shade too mature to fit the American temper well. She is too acute for sentiment, commercialism, and aboriginality, some notes of which apparently must be sounded in the future epic, if we may prognosticate from the vast public appeal of Mrs. Gene Stratton-Porter, the popular magazines, and Jack London. Mrs. Wharton's novels are like the well-geared social establishments of her own inner circle. Their tone is that of rather cool good sense, fine shades, delicate discrimination, things said without words, of everything that Undine Spragg would take for plain or monotonous