TIME SPIRIT: But, you know, you are really an artist!
MRS. WHARTON: Retro me, Sathanas! I beg your pardon, though; you couldn’t tempt me. I know what I know. There are things I have had, and have, to do without; but I don’t live with them; I live with what I have. Of course, all kinds of aims, and quite possibly some forms of achievement will be conferred upon me by those who practise the craft of fiction under the guise of criticism. But I am clearly not responsible for what they say, and it may not be used against me. I am only responsible for what I myself say—and that is: Nothing.
TIME SPIRIT: So you refuse to answer? On the usual ground, of course; it might tend to incriminate or degrade you?
MRS. WHARTON: I refuse to answer on the ground that it might incriminate and degrade others who write about me like this: “The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome—these are orchestral in their richly subtle clashing of overtones, a sort of infra-discordance which is among the rare improbable finenesses accessible to the artist, on condition of his readiness to take infinite pains for infinitesimal effects.”
TIME SPIRIT: Madame, permit me to deal lightly with you.
MRS. WHARTON: Merci, monsieur. But I think we have concluded our bargain, haven’t we? Au ’voir.
Books by Edith Wharton
1899 The Greater Inclination
1900 The Touchstone
1901 Crucial Instances
1902 The Valley of Decision
1903 Sanctuary
1904 The Descent of Man, and Other Stories
1904 Italian Villas and Their Gardens
1905 Italian Backgrounds
1905 The House of Mirth
1907 Madame de Treymes
1907 The Fruit of the Tree
1908 The Hermit and the Wild Woman
1908 A Motor-Flight Through France
1909 Artemis to Actæon and Other Verse
1910 Tales of Men and Ghosts
1911 Ethan Frome
1912 The Reef
1913 The Custom of the Country
1915 The Book of the Homeless
1915 Fighting France
The Decoration of Houses
The Joy of Living
1917 Xingu and Other Stories
1917 Summer
1918 The Marne
1919 French Ways and Their Meaning
1919 In Morocco
1920 The Age of Innocence
1922 The Glimpses of the Moon
1923 A Son at the Front
Sources on Edith Wharton
Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920, by Carl Van Doren. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 1922.