Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1790]

And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to “foreign” vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the center of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1790

Note

The central revelation of the chapter: Archer suddenly sees the dinner as a theater of collective surveillance, where the tribe’s performance of ignorance is itself a form of judgment. The phrase ‘lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to foreign vocabularies’ deftly shows how the group’s mental vocabulary can only register intimacy as guilt.