A scientist writes a satire on popular science and watches it become a bestseller taken in deadly earnest. Elsewhere a wife hosts both her former husbands at tea, a maid hears a bell no one living has rung, and a childless couple adopt a girl who is good to the point of exasperation. Most of these 1904 stories turn on New York society and its quiet cruelties.
Early Wharton at her wittiest, with one of her finest ghost stories in The Lady’s Maid’s Bell. Download the free EPUB.