In the night that follows his impetuous stab at heteronormativity, Edith Wharton’s queerest character is startled to consciousness by his sense of an intruding, untoward object.“I was waked by the queer feeling we all know,” Andrew Culwin reflects,“—the feeling that there was something in the room that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep”(43). Culwin, the interpellated narrator of “The Eyes,” has just surprised himself by proposing marriage to a young cousin—a proposal that he sees as his “suddenly undertak [ing] to promote the moral order of the world”(42). That night, he experiences his “queer feeling,” waking to the sense—and then the sight—of a pair of ghostly eyes. Culwin flees their presence, and flees his fiancée, too, embarking on a trajectory that will lead him to Europe, to Hong Kong, and, eventually, to the intimate library where he narrates his story to a few male friends whom he is lustily said to “lik [e]... juicy”(38). We might thus say that his “queer feeling” leads to Culwin’s queer orientation. Then again, since this feeling was aroused by the suspicion that the room Culwin occupies has been mysteriously reconfigured, it might be more accurate to recognize that his “queer feeling” was always a matter of his position in space—that is, it has always been a matter of orientation. I am interested in the emphatically spatial, haptic, and object-oriented quality of this scene of queer reorientation. Equally intriguing is its asserted universality: the proposal that “queer feeling” is a thing that “we all know.” 1 Taking my cue from Culwin’s suggestive phrase, I would like to make a few proposals regarding the construction of queer space in what Annette Benert has referred to as Wharton’s “architectural imagination.” Wharton, I suggest, renders queerness an always-available mode of experience during a period that was increasingly invested in understanding sexual orientation to be a matter of identity.