Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [17]

In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing, and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire, examples of which I could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering in this in so handicapped a way. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 17

Note

Henry James’s praise—‘silver correspondences in your façon de dire’—names Wharton’s controlled figuration as her signature, and his stuttering hedging (‘were I not stammering’) is Jamesian verbal performance in its own right.