Textual and intertextual secrets may be considered as ludic challenges to Edith Wharton’s most attentive readers. Indeed, such secrets occur alongside women’s fictional secrets in her writing with sufficient consistency to be viewed as a larger interpretative system operating within her body of work. On a practical level, while fictional secrets are there primarily for the benefit of those readers whom she herself described as ‘mechanical’ in an essay entitled ‘The Vice of Reading’ (1903), textual and intertextual secrets demand and reward the focused attention of her ‘born’ readers. Kate Clephane, heroine of The Mother’s Recompense (1925), guards a secret that involves her former lover and her daughter. Kate’s secret is central to the novel’s plot, but the narrative also expresses a more oblique message, or textual secret, concerning the self-inflected, physical harm caused by a woman’s withholding. This reading is strengthened when The Mother’s Recompense and Wharton’s early-career novella, Sanctuary (1903), are approached as intertexts, with the later text interrogating the earlier one’s hopeful vision of what secrecy may achieve.