The House of Mirth: 1st impressions, or Edith Wharton’s characterisation

I intended to read more books by women this year—as I’m quite familiar with the most important British female writers, it’s natural to get acquainted with American ones. 
At the moment I’m reading The House of Mirth. There isn’t much to say yet. So far I’ve been enjoying the prose, and the way Edith Wharton writes about her characters. 
About Percy Pryce:

“It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar.” (B.1, Ch.2) 

I must steal that. 
So what’s attractive about him? Money, of course. 

“…young Mr. Gryce's arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not only contrived to put herself in the young man's way, but had made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce…” (ibid.) 

I can’t help looking at that line without thinking about the opening line in Pride and Prejudice. 
About Bertha Dorset (or Mrs George Dorset): 

“She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.” (ibid.) 

An interesting image: “crumpled up and run through a ring”. I wonder what Henry James would have thought about it.  
About Ned Silverstone: 

“Lily could remember when young Silverton had stumbled into their circle, with the air of a strayed Arcadian who has published charming sonnets in his college journal. Since then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge […] Ned's case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his charming eyes—which had a good deal more poetry in them than the sonnets—change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement to anxiety, as he passed under the spell of the terrible god of chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her own case.” (B.1, Ch.3) 

The sonnets are probably not very good then. 
About Mrs Peniston, who takes on Lily Bart after her parents’ death: 

“It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.” (ibid.) 

Edith Wharton, I think, characterises by using a single image or a single idea to convey everything readers need to know about a character. Percy Pryce, for example, can’t distinguish “between railway tea and nectar”. Lily Bart’s mother detests “living like a pig”: 

“Lily could not recall the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague way her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency. It could certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her friends as a "wonderful manager." Mrs. Bart was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though one were much richer than one's bank-book denoted.
Lily was naturally proud of her mother's aptitude in this line: she had been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called "decently dressed." Mrs. Bart's worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to "live like a pig"; and his replying in the negative was always regarded as a justification for cabling to Paris for an extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might, after all, send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had looked at that morning.
Lily knew people who "lived like pigs," and their appearance and surroundings justified her mother's repugnance to that form of existence.” (ibid.)  

Then when Mr Bart is ruined: 

“Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate. Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was well enough to "manage" when by so doing one could keep one's own carriage; but when one's best contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth making.” (ibid.)  

Wharton uses “live like a pig” over and over again, defining Mrs Bart in that phrase, which captures the whole of her philosophy and Lily Bart’s upbringing. 
In a few lines, Edith Wharton explains the Bart marriage: 

“In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated train to start.” (ibid.) 

These brief passages explain all the forces that make Lily Bart who she is—why she contrives to catch a rich man. 
So far I enjoy Wharton’s means of characterisation. My favourite of all is this paragraph: 

“How dreary and trivial these people were! Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying a "spicy paragraph"; young Silverton, who had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer than her father.” (B.1, Ch.5) 

That bit is particularly good: “her general air of embodying a "spicy paragraph"”.