Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1353]

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age. There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of Mrs. Struthers’s easy Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that her champagne was transmuted shoe polish. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1353

Note

The mechanism of social change in New York is named: collusive forgetfulness, the traitor within the citadel. The vivid detail of champagne that was ‘transmuted shoe polish’ grounds the abstraction in the Struthers fortune.