One perspicacious reader has ventured to suggest that the figure implies not the general theory of Oneida so much as one specific moment in the sexual evolution imagined by Fourier: the "erotic quadrille," as he calls the frustrated social dance of two couples, caught in a web of "amorous desire and deceit," and needing to work their way up "from monogamy, to plurigamy to
cryptogamy to delphigamy to omnigamy." (19) Nor, given the depth of our difficulties with the plot, is there more than a momentary desire to decide what un-translated passage of Fourier a convalescent Coverdale decided to read to an attending Hollingsworth, so to arouse his moral sense and competitive social instinct.