It is generally believed that sentimentality is something not to be played with. Love is like fire, play with it and you will get burnt some day. On the other hand, it is also assume that the higher the climb, the heavier the fall. More than often, the weapon you use to harm others turns back to hurt you.
             Long-standing friends do not mean that they are entirely sincere to each other. A person has his/her own self, own personality which always aims at victory and superiority over other people.
             The two women – in their young age – love the same man, or at least want him to marry them, a certain Delphin. But of course only one succeeds: Alida, but with a trick, with which Alida wants to crush her friend Grace because she's always a woman with a passion of winning her opponents. She writes a letter to Grace taking Delphin's name, telling Grace to come out in the dark to see Delphin, of course without Delphin knowing it. The cold atmosphere at night could make Grace sick. This fever, together with her failure to meet Delphin generates Alida's complete victory, she thinks. But as it turns out later to be her entire failure. Receiving the letter supposedly written by Delphin, Grace writes back to him and they meet afterward. That is beyond Alida's plot. The story may end here, but Wharton's technical skill leads us to another trick to make the surprise to Alida complete. That is also her complete failure: Barbara, a child born of Delphin and Graces love affair.
             Mrs. Slade's well-assumed superiority over Mrs. Ansley is impossible for her to endure the paradox: her daughter Jenny is an angel, not as brilliant a girl as Ansley's Barbara. Mrs. Slade's greatest mistake is to write a letter ton Ansley.
             Only an escape literature story, it is made interesting and attractive with a simple plot. The plot and characters move by themselves without the author's intervention. The structure of...