The narrator remembers his mother hissing over her knitting that Lizzie Hazeldean ‘was bad, always.’ Years earlier, on a New Year’s Day in the 1870s, a fire at the Fifth Avenue Hotel had sent Lizzie and Henry Prest hurrying out before the eyes of old New York, and the novella slowly reveals why she was there and what it cost her.
One of the four novellas of Wharton’s Old New York, a sharp and sympathetic study of reputation. Download the free EPUB.