Beautiful story but would have liked to have seen Wharton develop this story further. Still, the short story packs quite a punch but in the end the reader is not quite satisfied. In some ways all of Wharton's books are like this because in that world a happy ending is so rare. Something about that world though makes the reader of today want to go back in a time machine. Somehow a simpler, less complicated world looks inviting to a reader from the post 2000 time period. Also, one thinks of the slippery slope of morality, and what happened to America, when we abandoned our values.