Suggesting a mysterious intelligence

What Vance carried back to Paul's Landing was his bewildering adventure at the Tarrants', where everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over—but where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things, an atmosphere as heavy with the Past as that of the library at the Willows.

Edith Wharton - Hudson River Bracketed (1929)

This is probably how elites manage to generate conspiracy theories without necessarily intending to. They thrive within elite gatherings where the look of the rooms and the people had something harmonious and long-related, suggesting a mysterious intelligence between persons and things. Further down the social hierarchy we all tend to thrive within similar gatherings - think of the regulars at a popular traditional pub.

Nipping back to the elites and in a wider and more critical arena their mysterious intelligence may not be intelligent at all and possibly not even mysterious, but from the inside that is how it seems. Perhaps within elite walls it would be common to find that everybody talked and nobody listened, or said anything particularly worth hearing, if you thought it over.

But that is the nub of the thing – if you though it over. If who thought it over? Thinking it over would have to be done within the social situation but from another perspective - an outsider’s for example. If there are no outsiders then thinking it over does not occur.