Edith Wharton's first novella opens with a temptation: Stephen Glennard, struggling and in love with a woman he cannot yet afford to marry, discovers that the intimate letters once written to him by a famous, now-dead novelist - a woman who had loved him devotedly - could be sold for the money he needs. The decision he makes, and the slow corrosion of conscience that follows, anticipates the moral precision of Wharton's great later novels of New York society. A tight, haunting chamber piece about the quiet bargains people strike with their own honor, and the way the dead continue to shape the living.
