The early stories, where the machinery is already assembled: a wife who will not divorce, a man who inherits a manuscript, the muse of a dead poet, a couple who meet in the afterlife and find the arrangement is not what either was promised. Wharton was born into the old New York money whose rules she spent her career dissecting, and became the first woman to take the Pulitzer. These are the pieces where she learned to be merciless.