Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1646]

But something silenced the word on his lips. A sort of passionate honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her into that familiar trap. “If I were to let her come,” he said to himself, “I should have to let her go again.” And that was not to be imagined. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1646

Note

This is the hinge of Archer’s moral psychology: he cannot will himself into the conventional affair because he has already interiorized exactly the logic that will defeat him—the ‘familiar trap’ is named before it is refused. The self-quotation shows the mechanism of self-deception operating at the level of syntax.