trained feeling ("trained down" perhaps), and critical to the point of satire.
If its evidences in her work are justly indicative of its importance, her critical proclivity must be considered as taking nearly as eminent a place among her powers as her creative faculty itself. Although quite as much temperamental as intellectual in the matter it deals with, a preoccupation with the touchstones of educated feeling, a business chiefly of gauging the qualities, the cleverness of persons, it is yet very cool judgement and accompanies her creative power to the end of the chapter. Her characters, the stars at least, share greatly in this power of criticism; it is merely in another capacity of their cleverness that they estimate themselves and their companions with precision. And the accuracy of their judgements is equalled by their finality; they "judge with their characters," which are notable for their stability of principle, for their chief principle, namely, cool and intelligent fineness of feeling, is a remarkable self-preservative. Their very stability is one of the factors entering into their ease of estimation; they are indeed stable—so stable that as they were in the beginning, so they are in the end. Dr. Wyant was an exception, but one suspects in his degeneration an ulterior architectural purpose. Certainly with all their mobility they advance in the same plane; and their movements must remain horizontal, since neither growth nor decay but rather maturity is the condition of their temperamental acumen.
The rather cold fineness of Mrs. Leath is an example of this stability of temperament; her sensitiveness of principle added much to the poignancy of her situation in that it augmented her torture and remained to the end a hopelessly irreconcilable element in her compromise; she was perpetually crucified by the criticism her instinct passed upon the anomalous position which her passion for Darrow compelled her into. Even more notable is the firmness to its principles of Justine Brent's warmer but more highly intellectualized temperament before the heavy shock of old Mr. Langhope's outraged feelings and her husband's involuntary recoil. Justine Brent is in this respect her creator's most distinct figure; no other of Mrs. Wharton's women is so certain of herself; in none is the native power of criticism sounder; in none is the integrity of feeling more absolute; in none is the tragedy much greater. Miss Bart, to whom the reader naturally turns as the most distinguished of Mrs. Whar-
