Wharton, Edith: The Custom of the Country

Undine Spragg, the anti-heroine of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, understood that if you were rich you married someone who was rich, but if you were rich and somehow handicapped (either embittered or enfeebled or stupid or old) you married someone less rich—and less embittered or enfeebled or stupid or old. The continuums ran from rich to poor, healthy to sick, young to old, smart to stupid—wealth, health, youth, smarts, all becoming commodities for barter—and her commodity was beauty without end. She could bottle it by the gallon, bag Wall Street bankers by the dozen, and still have oodles to spare—but “life administers the discipline her parents had spared her,” and she learns that cold beauty matters as little as cold cash without a warm heart to ignite it … or does she?!!