Originally titled The Line of Least Resistance after the story she thought was her best, the title was changed and the story removed after a neighbor in Lenox, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane, realized the story of marital infidelity was based on a relative. Wharton replaced the story with two new ones so that her second collection of contained seven stories.
Art is a central theme in many of these stories, ranging from the Gothic horror of “The Duchess at Prayer,” in which a husband orders a statue to take gruesome revenge on his wife and her lover, to the comic “The Rembrandt,” where a widow fallen into genteel poverty attempts to sell her final treasure.
Published in March 1901