Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1788]

Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing room. All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself: “If it were only to see her hand again I should have to follow her—” — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1788

Note

The metonymic transference of beauty from face to hand—as Ellen’s social position erases her, her physical particularity concentrates in the one permitted point of contact. It is the erotic counter-example to the collective erasure happening around them.