Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

The description fuses aesthetic refinement with physical and moral vitality—“vigorous and exquisite,” “strong and fine”—to convey a woman who seems improbably complete, as if nature (or society) had concentrated its best resources in her. The speaker’s “confused sense” that she “must have cost a great deal to make” frames beauty and excellence as the product of hidden expenditure: time, selection, and the quiet elimination of the ordinary. Wharton often anatomizes how elite cultures manufacture “finished” people through inheritance, training, and social filtration; the line also hints at the cruelty of such processes, where many lives are rendered negligible so that a rare, polished figure can emerge.