infantilism

In 1919, when Wharton, herself an expatriate in Paris, wrote that “compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in the kindergarten,” she might as well have been talking about Emily, whose stock-in-trade is a unique brand of empty infantilism.

The separation of those functions inoculates Britain from the infantilism peculiar to the American republic.

Because much of what royalty does amounts to public relations for itself, its occupational hazard is infantilism, to which several merry wives of Windsor and their disoriented husbands succumbed in recent decades.

It’s a childish move, but in keeping with the infantilism that still shapes the brothers’ uneasy relationship and their awkwardness with outsiders, particularly women.

Others might speculate on this, but only I can truly channel Trump, since only I possess the requisite degree of infantilism: