Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1588]

Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed singularly diminished. It was, in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humoring, watchful and incessant lie. A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1588

Note

Wharton crystallizes an entire code of conduct into a breathless anaphoric run that accelerates to a kind of moral vertigo. The fourfold accumulation of ‘a lie in every’ renders the social performance as total—its scope is the whole of lived time and the whole of the body.