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Part II
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Other Two, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Social Etiquette and Illusions
Marriage and Gender Inequality
Social Advancement
Summary
Analysis
The story picks up 10 days later. Mr. Sellers remains ill, and Mr. Waythorn goes to his house to inquire about the additional responsibilities he will take on. “I’m sorry, my dear fellow,” Sellers tells Waythorn. “I’ve got to ask you to do an awkward thing for me.” He informs Waythorn of Varick’s “rather complicated piece of business.” Varick has come into a large sum of money and needs someone to advise him. The matter cannot wait, and it falls to Waythorn to deal with Varick. Waythorn hesitates, but ultimately gives in, reasoning that “the honour of the office was to be considered, and he could hardly refuse to oblige his partner.”
The plot point foreshadowed in Waythorn and Varick’s uncomfortable run-in on the train is confirmed: Waythorn will have to take on Varick as a client. Waythorn’s hesitation implies the unease he feels at this proposition, but his desire to appear polite and composed (the traits he so admires in Alice) outweighs his desire to feel at ease, so he accepts the work.
Themes
Varick arrives at the office that afternoon. Waythorn notes that he “[bears] himself admirably.” Waythorn self-consciously anguishes over what the others at his office will think of this unlikely new business relationship with his wife’s ex-husband. Varick expresses his gratitude to Waythorn. He cites his financial inexperience, noting that “it feels uncommonly queer to have enough cash to pay one’s bills. I’d have sold my soul for it a few years ago!”
As before, Waythorn contrasts Varick’s confidence with his own internal feelings of unease. He’s anxious about what his social circle will think of this odd relationship, and desires to appear the calmer of the two. Varick’s awkward remark that it feels “uncommonly queer” to come into money implies that these funds might’ve saved his marriage to Mrs. Waythorn (“I’d have sold my soul for it a few years ago!”).
Themes
Waythorn “wince[s]” at this remark, as it is known that “a lack of funds” was partially to blame for the divorce between Varick and Alice. He wonders whether in Varick’s attempt to avoid broaching an awkward subject he has instead fallen knee-deep into one. Waythorn is ultimately pleased with the meeting, “glad, in the end, to appear the more self-possessed of the two.”
Waythorn stops himself from responding ungracefully to Varick’s social blunder (joking about the what-ifs that might have saved his marriage to Alice), choosing only to “wince.” Waythorn feels proud to be the “winner” of this social exchange, having held himself more gracefully and politely than the usually confident Varick.
Themes
Lily Haskett continues to improve, and Waythorn’s anxiety over Haskett, too, improves. He lets his guard down and doesn’t bother staying out abnormally late on Haskett’s visiting days. The following week, his carelessness gets the best of him and he enters the library “without noticing a shabby hat and umbrella in the hall.” In the library, Waythorn sees “a small effaced-looking man with a thinnish grey beard.” Waythorn compares the man to a piano-tuner, citing his unassuming presence and overall commonness. The man looks up and addresses Waythorn: “Mr. Waythorn, I presume? I am Lily’s father.”
Waythorn’s carelessness gets the best of him, and he falls into a trap of his own accidental making: he catches Haskett in the act of intruding (legally) on his private home. Wharton lingers on the physical details of Haskett and his personal affects in order to emphasize his “commonness.” The reader is meant to observe Haskett alongside Waythorn: to take him in from top to bottom, assessing, with surprise, every humble detail.
Themes
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Waythorn is surprised and embarrassed. Haskett is not what he expected him to be. Based on Alice’s descriptions and feelings toward Haskett, Waythorn “had been allowed to infer that Alice’s first husband was a brute.” In reality, Haskett behaves calmly, with “over-the-counter politeness.” The men briefly discuss Lily’s health, but Waythorn feels so uncomfortable and embarrassed that he exits the library almost immediately.
Waythorn is “embarrassed” because he had judged Haskett harshly (and incorrectly) in order to create a more palatable version of Alice’s previous life. It is easier and preferable for Waythorn to believe that Haskett was “a brute,” because it would allow Alice to fit into the role of “victim.” If Alice is a victim, Waythorn can be her hero—the good husband who can swoop in, save her, and give her the life she deserves. But Haskett’s humble appearance and “over-the-counter politeness” reveal a truth that Waythorn finds impossible to bear.
Themes
Literary Devices
In his bedroom, Waythorn curses “the womanish sensibility which had made him suffer so acutely from the grotesque chances of life.” He wonders how he could he have been so wrong about Mr. Haskett, and how he could have been so naive to think that marrying a woman with two living husbands would not present the opportunity for awkward run-ins. His semi-awkward encounters with Varick pale in comparison to this “intolerable” meeting with Haskett.
Haskett’s commonness contradicts Waythorn’s previous assumptions about his status and character. While he had previously been allowed to believe that Haskett was to blame for Mrs. Waythorn’s first divorce (that she left him because he was an abusive tyrant), he now realizes that she left him because he was poor and she thought she could do better. If Haskett is not a brute, Waythorn can no longer see his wife as a victim.
Themes
Waythorn notices a photograph of Alice on his dressing-table. Alice wears a pearl necklace that had been gifted to her by Varick. Waythorn recalls how he forced her to get rid of the necklace before they were married. He wonders whether Haskett gifted her any jewelry, and what has become of it.
To Waythorn, Varick’s necklace symbolizes the lingering presence of Alice’s ex-husbands. While previously Waythorn had attempted to remove any physical traces of the ex-husbands, the sudden appearance of Haskett and Varick into the Waythorns’ lives forces him to question how fully Mrs. Waythorn will ever be rid of her past.
Themes
These questions prompt Mr. Waythorn to consider the other unknown aspects of Alice’s past life. An image of Haskett’s “made-up tie attached with an elastic” flashes into Waythorn’s mind, and he realizes that the tie is “the key to Alice’s past.” He sees his wife in a new light: one informed by origins humbler than he’d originally thought.
Waythorn’s realizations about Haskett force him to see Alice in a new, more damning light. In Haskett’s tie, Waythorn sees the common origins Alice loathed and longed to leave behind, as well as the opportunism (her desire for wealth, status, social acceptance) that presumably motivated her series of marriages and divorces. He realizes that Alice marries for social advancement, not for love, and that he is no different than the other two husbands. Waythorn now sees Haskett (and perhaps himself) as the victim, and Alice as the villain.
Themes
Waythorn thinks about Alice when she was Mrs. Haskett, “chafing at her life, and secretly feeling that she belonged in a bigger place.” Most horrifying to Waythorn is “the way in which she had shed the phase of existence which her marriage with Haskett implied.” Waythorn observes: “It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of her life.”
