[...] The very materiality of old New York is resistant to change, and it is indeed recorded by Wharton in impressive detail, prompting the reviewer William Lyon Phelps to declare, 'I do not remember when I have read a work of fiction that gives the reader so vivid an idea of the furnishing and illuminating of rooms in fashionable houses.' Turning to the blighted fate of those who inhabit these rooms, he continues:

The absolute imprisonment in which her characters stagnate, their artificial and false standards, the desperate monotony of trivial routine, the slow petrifaction of generous ardours, the paralysis of emotion, the accumulation of ice around the heart, the total loss of life in an upholstered existence -- are depicted with a high excellence that never falters ... The love scenes between [Archer] and Ellen are wonderful in their terrible inarticulate passion ... So little is said, so little is done, yet one feels the infinite passion in the finite hearts that burn.