"Crucial Instances" by Edith Wharton is a collection of seven of the author's short stories. The volume contains: "The Duchess at Prayer," "The Angel at the Grave," "The Recovery," "Copy: A Dialogue," "The Rembrandt," "The Moving Finger," and "The Confessional." To write these tales, Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper-class New York "aristocracy" to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age.