Each Time You Happen to Me

Why does Ellen Olenska love Newland Archer at all? Roxane Gay was asked point blank, and her answer gives these chapters their engine: not the man, the idea of safety. From there the trap closes. Gay does the arithmetic on how fortunes like these were made, watches May put out a candle at exactly the right moment, and follows a snowbound carriage in which Wharton hands her most compromised man the most romantic line she ever wrote. Gay calls it one of the sexiest lines in all of literature, then asks what he would actually do if Ellen called his bluff. Her answer is the episode's cold heart.