In her first New York society dinner at the Fairfords', the relentlessly upwardly mobile but intellectually ill-prepared anti-heroine Undine Spragg is ambushed by the highbrow conversation at the table, and is forced to concede the limitations of her own literary knowledge: ‘she had read no new book but “When the Kissing Had to Stop”, of which Mrs Fairford seemed not to have heard’ (p. 37). Surprisingly, Undine's recollection is not of a cheap popular novel, as we might expect from her social and cultural background, but of the famous lines from Browning's poem ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi's’, a mid-nineteenth-century elegiac musing on eighteenth-century Venetian hedonism, first published in the critically acclaimed collection Men and Women (1855):

Elaine Showalter has interpreted this small social humiliation, exposing the limited frame of Undine's cultural reference, as uncontested evidence of authorial criticism, and even disapproval; Wharton, Showalter unequivocally argues, ‘mocks Undine's ignorance in reading “When the Kissing had to Stop”’. Show-alter's assessment of Undine's reading is reductive and absolute, and, I would suggest, closed to the multiple interpretative possibilities suggested by almost any act of reading or allusion to a text.