Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [1861]

There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the Mission garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hard bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 1861

Note

The final assessment of May: the qualities that made her exemplary also made her static; ‘hard bright blindness’ is the exact oxymoron of a goodness that cannot register change. The retrospective distance of the whole novel is compressed here.