The Other Two by Edith Wharton
Quick answer: The Other Two by Edith Wharton: full summary and ending, characters, themes of divorce and social adaptation, and the craft of its perfect final tableau.
Waythorn has married a charming, twice-divorced woman, and within weeks the arithmetic of modern life delivers both of her former husbands into his drawing room, his office and his tea table. Edith Wharton published The Other Two in 1904, in the collection The Descent of Man, and it may be the most elegant comedy she ever built: a story about divorce in which nobody behaves badly and that is exactly the problem.
New York at the turn of the century was just learning to absorb remarriage, and Wharton, its sharpest social accountant, saw the comic ledger at once: a third husband does not replace his predecessors, he joins them. The story follows Waythorn's education from possessive bridegroom to resigned shareholder in a syndicate, and its final scene, three husbands and one cup of tea, is quoted in craft classes as one of the great closing tableaux in short fiction.
The story in brief, ending included
Newly married Waythorn waits for his wife Alice, whose daughter by her first marriage, little Lily, has fallen ill with typhoid. The illness gives her first husband, Haskett, the legal right to visit the child under Waythorn's own roof once a week. At almost the same time, Waythorn's firm requires him to handle the business affairs of Gus Varick, husband number two, since a colleague is away. Waythorn braces for vulgarity and finds none: Haskett is a mild, shabby, conscientious man in a made-up tie who wants only his daughter's good, and Varick is an easy, well-fed clubman who handles their business dealings with perfect tact. The horror is subtler than scandal: each encounter teaches Waythorn something about Alice's past selves, the cheap early life with Haskett, the fashionable interval with Varick, and he begins to see his wife as a shoe worn into ease by other feet, a compromise of accumulated adaptations.
Wharton advances by small, exquisite humiliations: Alice, at dinner, absently pours cognac into Waythorn's coffee, exactly as Varick liked it. Waythorn gradually surrenders, choosing the comedy of acceptance over the melodrama of jealousy; he even comes to respect Haskett's dogged fatherhood. In the final scene, Haskett is waiting in the library to discuss Lily, Varick arrives to conclude a piece of business, and before either can decently leave, Alice sweeps in and serves tea to all three husbands with unshakeable grace. She hands Waythorn his cup, and he, taking it, laughs. That laugh, amused, defeated, adult, is the story's last word.
The characters and what they want
A quartet in which the woman is the sum the men keep auditing.
Themes and meaning
The exam themes: divorce and its social digestion, marriage as property and the discovery that the property has a history, and identity as adaptation, Alice as a self assembled from the requirements of three successive men. Wharton's imagery does the arguing: Waythorn's famous reflection that his wife is as easy as an old shoe, worn by other men, and his later, kinder image of himself as holding one share in a company. Class runs underneath: Haskett's made-up tie tells Waythorn more about Alice's origins than any confession could.
The sharper observation is that the story's target is not Alice but the fantasy of total possession. Every discomfort Waythorn suffers comes from an expectation the modern world has already quietly cancelled, and his final laugh is the sound of that expectation dying, which Wharton frames as maturity rather than defeat. Note too the story's moral inversion: the shabby first husband, the one social New York would least admit, is its only character with clean motives. Essays that spot Haskett's quiet dignity usually outrank those that read him as comic relief.
The craft: escalation by drawing room
The plot is a machine of converging pressures: custody brings Haskett, business brings Varick, and Wharton is scrupulous that every convergence is plausible, dutiful and nobody's fault. The technique to steal is escalation without villainy, tightening a protagonist's situation using only reasonable people doing reasonable things. Each of the three acts ends with the circle closing one notch: office, house, tea table.
The ending is the model of the closing tableau: a single composed image, three husbands, one hostess, cups going round, that states the theme without a word of summary, and then the smallest possible human sound, a laugh, to sign it. Writers should note what Wharton does not write: no reflection paragraph, no verdict on Alice, no forecast of the marriage. The image is trusted to hold everything. A contest entry that closes on one perfectly loaded picture rather than an explanation almost always reads as the work of the more experienced hand.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, quote the old shoe and the one share in a company images; they are the story's thesis in miniature.
- Contrast Haskett's made-up tie with Varick's club polish: class detail as biography.
- Argue a position on Alice, survivor or chameleon, and use the cognac slip as your key evidence.
- Writers: escalate by making every complication reasonable; remove villains and the theme stands alone.
- End on a tableau that contains all your forces in one frame, then close with a gesture, not a moral.
- Let small domestic errors, a drink poured the old way, carry the weight of whole past marriages.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which your protagonist must keep meeting, through perfectly legitimate channels, two people who once held their exact place in someone's life. No confrontations allowed: every scene must be polite, and the ending must be a single image that accepts the arithmetic.
Questions
What does the ending of The Other Two mean?
The final tea scene gathers all three of Alice's husbands in one room while she serves them with perfect composure. Waythorn's laugh as he takes the third cup marks his surrender of the fantasy of sole possession: he accepts that marriage to Alice means shareholding, not ownership.
What is the theme of The Other Two?
The story examines divorce and remarriage in a society still inventing its manners, and asks what a self is if it adapts perfectly to each partner. Alice's smooth flexibility, and Waythorn's education out of jealousy, carry Wharton's cool double verdict.
Is Alice the villain of The Other Two?
Wharton declines to convict her. Alice does nothing worse than adapt completely to each husband in turn; the story's irony targets Waythorn's assumption that a wife with a past could be exclusively his. Notably, the only wholly selfless character is Haskett, the poorest of the three men.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the August contest and have your own poem read and scored.