Edith Wharton, one of America's foremost women of letters, chronicled the glittering world of New York society in the early twentieth century. Her stories, collected in such volumes as The Greater Inclination (1899), The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), and Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910), scrutinize the moral decay beneath the glamorous facade of wealth and good manners. Although Wharton's sensibilities are closely aligned with Victorian literary...