Sentence No. 19 · 15 April 2026
To be poor seemed to her such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances.
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton — The House of Mirth (1905) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The semicolon here joins two independent clauses that build on each other. The first clause ends with a colon-like pivot word "disgrace," signalling the second clause will deepen — not contradict — it; so place any phrase containing "disgrace" before the semicolon, never after.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 6 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. Lily Bart, beautiful and poor, surveys the society she lives in and understands for the first time its cruelty. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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