A man sells the love letters a famous dead novelist wrote him — anonymously, for the money to marry — and then must live inside the marriage the money bought. Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, published this novella in 1900; it is the earliest statement of her permanent subject, which is not adultery or money but the small betrayal a decent person makes and then has to eat, daily, for years. Six decades of paintings, from Cassatt to Hammershøi, dwell on readers and letters, the quiet interiors where a private betrayal is read and reread.
