Time & Perspective Quote by Edith Wharton

Gossip, Wharton suggests, doesn’t transmit truth; it manufactures it. The line lands with the cool precision of someone who has watched “society” operate like a telephone game with stakes: reputations, marriages, inheritances, exile. “Bit by bit” is doing quiet work here. It implies not only incompleteness but a kind of social nibbling, information taken in small, deniable bites so no single speaker owns the whole lie. The narrator becomes an unwilling archivist of partial accounts, collecting fragments that refuse to assemble into a stable picture.

Wharton’s bite is in the parenthetical aside: “as generally happens in such cases.” It’s a shrug that indicts an entire culture of narration. The point isn’t that people misremember; it’s that they customize. Each retelling is shaped by self-protection, class anxiety, moral posturing, or the small thrill of proximity to scandal. “Each time it was a different story” reads like a punchline, but it’s also a method: Wharton primes us to distrust not just the town’s chatter, but the very apparatus by which a community decides what’s “true.”

In her world, social reality is adjudicated in drawing rooms, not courtrooms. Facts are less persuasive than consensus, and consensus is built from stories that flatter the teller’s position. The sentence functions as a warning label for the novel itself: if you want the real plot, look past the versions people need to believe and toward what those versions reveal about them.