Going through the rejected variants for The House of Mirth & comparing them to the manuscript for the second time, some items stick out a bit differently. This is the one of the verso pages for Book 2, Chapter 6, in which Lily’s back in town in a small rooming house, with nowhere to go and no one to see. She’s just told George Dorset that she “knows nothing” about Bertha’s affair with Neddy Silverton and now, finding herself even more at loose ends than usual, starts thinking about images that “must at any cost be exorcised; & one of these was the image of herself as Rosedale’s wife.”

As she’s musing idly about erasing her identity and embracing her fate, here’s what Wharton wrote on the back of the page: “Lily Bart,” as if Lily herself is signing her name, with two underlined flourishes. It’s not part of anything else in the passage. It’s as though Lily, through Edith, is making her identity known.