Identifying Edith Wharton’s use of ellipsis, more or less consistent throughout her writing career, as her mannerism, this essay examines ellipses in The Age of Innocence so as to consider the larger implications of the punctuation mark that were in fact tested by a number of modernist writers who, to quote Ann Toner, “were committed philosophically and aesthetically to forms of the obscure.” If these writers’ experiment with ellipsis is done in accordance with their literary and political objective to distance themselves from the previous era, however, Wharton’s mannerism in this “historical novel of manners” shares the author’s commitment to make the manners of the old age viable in the new age without being overly nostalgic to those manners or hostile to the new age. In other words, ellipsis in the novel is Wharton’s stylistic way to retain the potential of the manners to face the potential of reality and corroborate with it for future possibilities. Inscribing the potential of both the manners and reality into the text, thus, Wharton’s mannerism finds its aesthetic and philosophic pairing in what might be termed as Deleuze’s mannerism, which is to engage with “everyday life” and “ render present other possible worlds within [it].”