face” (p. 99). If physiognomy is a means of reading personal history, it is Mattie’s once bright and vital face that has come to resemble Zeena’s: “Her hair was as grey as her companion’s, her face as bloodless and shrivelled, but amber-tinted, with swarthy shadows sharpening the nose and hollowing the temples. Under her shapeless dress her body kept its limp immobility, and her dark eyes had the bright witch-like stare that disease of the spine sometimes gives” (p. 95). The faces of the two women, sometimes confused in Ethan’s consciousness, have come to resemble each other. Mattie and Zeena, in effect, have reversed roles, the latter assuming the role of caregiver, thus repeating the “doctoring” activities she performed in years past for Ethan’s sickly mother.

The contrast to the opening frame, in which the narrator’s queries had elicited almost no reply from Mrs. Ned Hale, seems obvious. In a reversal of the rhythm of the exchange in the opening, the narrator is now content to let his reserve work on the taciturn townspeople. They are now curious as to what insights he has gained after being the first visitor to have spent a night in the Frome household in many years. Mrs. Hale had assumed that our unnamed visitor had been lost or “buried under a snow-drift” (p. 96), but when he emerges, part of his enhanced “vision” includes the now more expressive words of the townspeople who had previously been so reluctant to speak. (In Wharton’s 1910 story “The Legend,” a famous figure drops out of sight, only to emerge “frozen stiff” [p. 184] from the snow, with a new name. That name, significantly, is “Winterman.”) The outsider has indeed come to learn, via his penetration of the household and by his attention to the hints and comments offered by the townspeople, how much the wintry landscape has influenced the inner and outer lives of its inhabitants. Here, as in much of Wharton’s New England fiction, the lines between life and death are blurred. A representative of Starkfield offers the last word on the range of pain and suffering experienced by members of the Frome household. Mrs. Hale notes: “I don’t see’s there’s much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; ‘cept that down there they’re all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues” (p. 95).

Like Wharton’s other New England stories, “The Pretext” (1908), written several years before Ethan Frome, has been criticized for its bleakness. If Ethan Frome yearns for escape with the youthful Mattie, Mrs. Margaret Ransom has found a fleeting alternative to the routine of her existence that is as “flat as the pattern of the wall-paper” (p. 104). Her escape comes in the guise of a young Englishman, Guy Dawnish, who, like Ethan, aspires to be an engineer. Rather than a rustic setting, this story takes place in the staid New England university town of Wentworth. Wharton’s meticulous attention to the expressive features of her characters’ faces is once again evident throughout the story, and Dawnish’s visits to the aging Mrs. Ransom occur in a wintry light. During the second winter of the young man’s visits, Mrs. Ransom comes to question the “relentless domesticity” (p. 106) of her relations to her husband. More significantly, she reproaches herself as she confronts “her rigid New England ancestry” (p. 104).

Like Ethan Frome, this story is about “frozen lives” (p. 104) and the legacy of the Puritan past; it also shares with the novel an interest in meaningful and accurate observation—that is, vision. The story is literally framed by two brief scenes in which Mrs. Ransom is engaged in self-evaluation while gazing in a mirror. Is Margaret Ransom’s vision in the closing scene acute in that she has realized that Guy has used her as a “pretext,” as a visit from his English relative seems to suggest? According to this interpretation, Guy’s affection for Mrs. Ransom has been insincere, and he has used Mrs. Ransom’s name to protect the identity of his real lover. The relative’s repeated “I don’t see,” however, calls into serious question the accuracy of her insight into the situation, and the ultimate illusion may be Mrs. Ransom’s. Her all-too-quiet resignation to “an aching vision of the length of the years that stretched before her” (p. 131)-much like the long years of endurance in the Frome household—may be based on the questionable assumption that a young man easily grows weary of a flirtation with a