A diplomat, delayed in Paris by a letter putting him off, spends a few days with a girl he meets by chance — and months later finds her installed in the French château where he has come to marry the widow he has loved for years. Wharton wrote this in 1912 after her own affair and on the eve of her divorce; James called it her finest book. Nothing is confessed and everything is understood, which is worse. Fifty-seven plates, from Tissot's ball on shipboard to Monet's harbor light, follow the novel's course from chance meeting to château.
