nner circles. These were very small, and they suggested an
American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the aborigines of
their native continent.

Ralph Marvell in _The Custom of the Country_ described Washington
Square as the "Reservation," and prophesied that "before long its
inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically
engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries." Mrs. Wharton has
exhibited them in the exercise of industries not precisely primitive,
and yet aboriginal enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely
shoulders to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade
their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in keeping new
aspirants out of drawing-room and country house has always been greater
than the success of the men in keeping them out of Wall Street, the
aboriginal aristocracy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs
for the most part in drawing-rooms and country houses. There, however,
to judge by _The House of Mirth_, _The Custom of the Country_, and _The
Age of Innocence_, the life of the inhabitants, far from being a
continuous revel as represented by the popular novelists, is marked by
nothing so much as an uncompromising decorum.

Take the case of Lily Bart in _The House of Mirth_. She goes to pieces
on the rocks of that decorum, though she has every advantage of birth
except a fortune, and knows the rules of the game perfectly. But she
cannot follow them with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she
has the Aristotelian hero's fatal defect of a single weakness. In that
golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily Bart hesitates,
oscillates, and is lost. Having left her appointed course, she finds on
trying to return to her former society that it is little less
impermeable to her than she has seen rank outsiders find it. Then there
is Undine Spragg in _The Custom of the Country_, who, marrying and
divorcing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate for a
season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren beauty into the
centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers can purchase much, thanks to
the desires of men, and Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards
all delicate disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end
she fails. The custom of her country--Apex City and the easy-going
West--is not the decorum of New York reinforced by European examples.
Newland Archer and Ellen Olens