Refinement of feeling, with them, has grown up into a fusion with ethical principle and has given them an aesthetic morality, the effectiveness of which in general is witnessed by the current saying that gentility—which is the code of such morality—is not a thing to be assumed, that it must be a part of character. But this may mean, merely that gentility, being a code devised by persons of accomplished feeling for themselves and their coequals, cannot readily be assumed by those who are not also of temperamental quality. Moreover the aspect of gentility as a code is readily seen when the life declines that vitalized it: it then becomes mere ceremony. At its best, however, and we see it so in Mrs. Wharton's best characters, it is an indisseverable ornament of its possessor, like well modulated speech, and is so mistaken for its animating temperament, for the voice that utters it. The refinement of Mrs. Wharton's characters, how from another side it is to be seen as integrity of feeling, could be shown again by reference to Lily Bart. She had no lack of opportunities to secure a field for the fitting exercise of her cleverness; how many times she was on the point of so doing by an alliance with wealthy stupidity, but how many times recoiled because "at heart she despised" a chance of such a sort! She could never quite, even on the edge of ruin, bring herself to sacrifice her integrity of feeling permanently; and although her recoil was as much a matter of fastidiousness as of principle, it was no less energetic for that. Historically, no doubt, this integrity of temperament has its root principles among the old and tried rules of conduct, the fundamental social conventions; but with these individuals such rules are so interfused with the medium feeling in which they are held as no longer to be recognizable as anything so abstract as principles. How much a matter of feeling they are to become is reserved for Ralph Marvell and his family circle of Dagonets and Fairfords to show. This group of people is typical of Mrs. Wharton's favourite finely temperamental sort of person, and they behaved typically toward Undine Spragg's suit for divorce: it was an ugly fact in their lives, but they preserved their integrity of feeling by ignoring it; they turned their backs upon it; they avoided talking and thinking about it; they even made a fatal mistake in dealing with it—all to spare their feelings.
As a matter of fact, among the Dagonets, the Fairfords, the Marvells, the Seldens, the de Chelles, the reader finds himself in an aris-
