Wharton, Edith — The Age of Innocence [697]

Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of non-existence. Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved. — Wharton, Edith, The Age of Innocence, 697

Note

A precise micro-mechanism of social control: Beaufort’s refusal to acknowledge someone makes them feel annihilated (‘invisibility, of non-existence’), and the observing-unobserved position turns that humiliation into a vantage. This is an explicit statement of how exclusion operates as erasure — the exact dynamic that governs Ellen’s whole place in the set.