Book I

I.

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was

singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan

distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should

compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European

capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every

winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.

Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus

keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and

yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic

associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so

problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the

daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally

brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through

the slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious

family landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "Brown coupe."

To come to the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way

of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means

had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to

democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in

the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of

one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy. It was

one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have

discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more

quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the

curtain had just gone up on the garden scene. There was no reason

why the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at

seven, alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward

over a cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases

and finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where

Mrs. Archer allowed smoking. But, in the first place, New York was

a metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was "not

the thing" to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not

"the thing" played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York

as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his

forefathers thousands of years ago.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one. He had dawdled

over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking

over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than

its realisation. This was especially the case when the pleasure was

a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion

the moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite in quality

that--well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima

donna's stage-manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more

significant moment than just as she was singing: "He loves me--he loves

me not--_he loves me_!--" and sprinkling the falling daisy petals with

notes as clear as dew.

She sang, of course, "_M'ama_!" and not "he loves me," since an

unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required

that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists

should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of

English-speaking audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer

as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as

the duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue

enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a

flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

"_M'ama ... non m'ama ..._" the prima donna sang, and "_M'ama_!", with

a final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy

to her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance

of the little brown Faust-Capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight

purple velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his

artless victim.

Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box,

turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the

house. Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott,

whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her

to attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable

nights by some of the younger members of the family. On this occasion,

the front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lovell

Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn behind

these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically

fixed on the stage-lovers. As Madame Nilsson's "_M'ama_!" thrilled

out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during

the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her

brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of

her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened

with a single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet

of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her

white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath of

satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to

be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the

Opera houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights,

was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance

symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed

the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large

pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the

roses, and closely resembling the floral pen-wipers made by female

parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath

the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch

flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off

prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white

cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a

blue girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side

of her muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's

impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his

designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the

ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from

the right wing.

"The darling!" thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to

the young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley. "She doesn't even guess

what it's all about." And he contemplated her absorbed young face

with a thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine

initiation was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.

"We'll read Faust together ... by the Italian lakes ..." he thought,

somewhat hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with

the masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to

reveal to his bride. It was only that afternoon that May Welland had

let him guess that she "cared" (New York's consecrated phrase of maiden

avowal), and already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement

ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin, pictured her at

his side in some scene of old European witchery.

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a

simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to

develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own

with the most popular married women of the "younger set," in which it

was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully

discouraging it. If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he

sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife

should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady

whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years;

without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred

that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for a

whole winter.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain

itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out;

but he was content to hold his view without analysing it, since he

knew it was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated,

button-hole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the

club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their

opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product

of the system. In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt

himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New

York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen

a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number. Singly

they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented

"New York," and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their

doctrine on all the issues called moral. He instinctively felt that

in this respect it would be troublesome--and also rather bad form--to

strike out for himself.

"Well--upon my soul!" exclaimed Lawrence Lefferts, turning his

opera-glass abruptly away from the stage. Lawrence Lefferts was,

on the whole, the foremost authority on "form" in New York. He had

probably devoted more time than any one else to the study of this

intricate and fascinating question; but study alone could not account

for his complete and easy competence. One had only to look at him,

from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful

fair moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of

his lean and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form"

must be congenital in any one who knew how to wear such good clothes

so carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace. As a

young admirer had once said of him: "If anybody can tell a fellow just

when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to, it's

Larry Lefferts." And on the question of pumps versus patent-leather

"Oxfords" his authority had never been disputed.

"My God!" he said; and silently handed his glass to old Sillerton

Jackson.

Newland Archer, following Lefferts's glance, saw with surprise that his

exclamation had been occasioned by the entry of a new figure into old

Mrs. Mingott's box. It was that of a slim young woman, a little less

tall than May Welland, with brown hair growing in close curls about her

temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds. The suggestion

of this headdress, which gave her what was then called a "Josephine

look," was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather

theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle with a large

old-fashioned clasp. The wearer of this unusual dress, who seemed quite

unconscious of the attention it was attracting, stood a moment in the

centre of the box, discussing with Mrs. Welland the propriety of taking

the latter's place in the front right-hand corner; then she yielded

with a slight smile, and seated herself in line with Mrs. Welland's

sister-in-law, Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who was installed in the opposite

corner.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson had returned the opera-glass to Lawrence

Lefferts. The whole of the club turned instinctively, waiting to

hear what the old man had to say; for old Mr. Jackson was as great

an authority on "family" as Lawrence Lefferts was on "form." He

knew all the ramifications of New York's cousinships; and could not

only elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection

between the Mingotts (through the Thorleys) with the Dallases of

South Carolina, and that of the relationship of the elder branch of

Philadelphia Thorleys to the Albany Chiverses (on no account to be

confused with the Manson Chiverses of University Place), but could also

enumerate the leading characteristics of each family: as, for instance,

the fabulous stinginess of the younger lines of Leffertses (the Long

Island ones); or the fatal tendency of the Rushworths to make foolish

matches; or the insanity recurring in every second generation of the

Albany Chiverses, with whom their New York cousins had always refused

to intermarry--with the disastrous exception of poor Medora Manson,

who, as everybody knew ... but then her mother was a Rushworth.

In addition to this forest of family trees, Mr. Sillerton Jackson

carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch

of silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that

had smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within

the last fifty years. So far indeed did his information extend, and

so acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the

only man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker,

really was, and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson

Mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large

sum of trust money) less than a year after his marriage, on the very

day that a beautiful Spanish dancer who had been delighting thronged

audiences in the old Opera-house on the Battery had taken ship for

Cuba. But these mysteries, and many others, were closely locked in Mr.

Jackson's breast; for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his

repeating anything privately imparted, but he was fully aware that his

reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out

what he wanted to know.

The club box, therefore, waited in visible suspense while Mr. Sillerton

Jackson handed back Lawrence Lefferts's opera-glass. For a moment he

silently scrutinised the attentive group out of his filmy blue eyes

overhung by old veined lids; then he gave his moustache a thoughtful

twist, and said simply: "I didn't think the Mingotts would have tried

it on."

II.

Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a

strange state of embarrassment.

It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided

attention of masculine New York should be that in which his betrothed

was seated between her mother and aunt; and for a moment he could not

identify the lady in the Empire dress, nor imagine why her presence

created such excitement among the initiated. Then light dawned on him,

and with it came a momentary rush of indignation. No, indeed; no one

would have thought the Mingotts would have tried it on!

But they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low-toned comments behind

him left no doubt in Archer's mind that the young woman was May

Welland's cousin, the cousin always referred to in the family as "poor

Ellen Olenska." Archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from Europe

a day or two previously; he had even heard from Miss Welland (not

disapprovingly) that she had been to see poor Ellen, who was staying

with old Mrs. Mingott. Archer entirely approved of family solidarity,

and one of the qualities he most admired in the Mingotts was their

resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless stock

had produced. There was nothing mean or ungenerous in the young man's

heart, and he was glad that his future wife should not be restrained by

false prudery from being kind (in private) to her unhappy cousin; but

to receive Countess Olenska in the family circle was a different thing

from producing her in public, at the Opera of all places, and in the

very box with the young girl whose engagement to him, Newland Archer,

was to be announced within a few weeks. No, he felt as old Sillerton

Jackson felt; he did not think the Mingotts would have tried it on!

He knew, of course, that whatever man dared (within Fifth Avenue's

limits) that old Mrs. Manson Mingott, the Matriarch of the line, would

dare. He had always admired the high and mighty old lady, who, in spite

of having been only Catherine Spicer of Staten Island, with a father

mysteriously discredited, and neither money nor position enough to

make people forget it, had allied herself with the head of the wealthy

Mingott line, married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an Italian

marquis and an English banker), and put the crowning touch to her

audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone (when

brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the

afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.

Old Mrs. Mingott's foreign daughters had become a legend. They never

came back to see their mother, and the latter being, like many persons

of active mind and dominating will, sedentary and corpulent in her

habit, had philosophically remained at home. But the cream-coloured

house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of the Parisian

aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and

she throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of

the Tuileries of Louis Napoleon (where she had shone in her middle

age), as placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above

Thirty-fourth Street, or in having French windows that opened like

doors instead of sashes that pushed up.

Every one (including Mr. Sillerton Jackson) was agreed that old

Catherine had never had beauty--a gift which, in the eyes of New York,

justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.

Unkind people said that, like her Imperial namesake, she had won her

way to success by strength of will and hardness of heart, and a kind of

haughty effrontery that was somehow justified by the extreme decency

and dignity of her private life. Mr. Manson Mingott had died when she

was only twenty-eight, and had "tied up" the money with an additional

caution born of the general distrust of the Spicers; but his bold young

widow went her way fearlessly, mingled freely in foreign society,

married her daughters in heaven knew what corrupt and fashionable

circles, hobnobbed with Dukes and Ambassadors, associated familiarly

with Papists, entertained Opera singers, and was the intimate friend of

Mme. Taglioni; and all the while (as Sillerton Jackson was the first

to proclaim) there had never been a breath on her reputation; the

only respect, he always added, in which she differed from the earlier

Catherine.

Mrs. Manson Mingott had long since succeeded in untying her husband's

fortune, and had lived in affluence for half a century; but memories

of her early straits had made her excessively thrifty, and though,

when she bought a dress or a piece of furniture, she took care that it

should be of the best, she could not bring herself to spend much on

the transient pleasures of the table. Therefore, for totally different

reasons, her food was as poor as Mrs. Archer's, and her wines did

nothing to redeem it. Her relatives considered that the penury of her

table discredited the Mingott name, which had always been associated

with good living; but people continued to come to her in spite of the

"made dishes" and flat champagne, and in reply to the remonstrances of

her son Lovell (who tried to retrieve the family credit by having the

best chef in New York) she used to say laughingly: "What's the use of

two good cooks in one family, now that I've married the girls and can't

eat sauces?"

Newland Archer, as he mused on these things, had once more turned

his eyes toward the Mingott box. He saw that Mrs. Welland and her

sister-in-law were facing their semicircle of critics with the

Mingottian _aplomb_ which old Catherine had inculcated in all her

tribe, and that only May Welland betrayed, by a heightened colour

(perhaps due to the knowledge that he was watching her) a sense of the

gravity of the situation. As for the cause of the commotion, she sat

gracefully in her corner of the box, her eyes fixed on the stage, and

revealing, as she leaned forward, a little more shoulder and bosom than

New York was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reasons

for wishing to pass unnoticed.

Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against

"Taste," that far-off divinity of whom "Form" was the mere visible

representative and vicegerent. Madame Olenska's pale and serious face

appealed to his fancy as suited to the occasion and to her unhappy

situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from

her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him. He hated to think of May

Welland's being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless

of the dictates of Taste.

"After all," he heard one of the younger men begin behind him

(everybody talked through the Mephistopheles-and-Martha scenes), "after

all, just _what_ happened?"

"Well--she left him; nobody attempts to deny that."

"He's an awful brute, isn't he?" continued the young enquirer, a candid

Thorley, who was evidently preparing to enter the lists as the lady's

champion.

"The very worst; I knew him at Nice," said Lawrence Lefferts with

authority. "A half-paralysed white sneering fellow--rather handsome

head, but eyes with a lot of lashes. Well, I'll tell you the sort: when

he wasn't with women he was collecting china. Paying any price for

both, I understand."

There was a general laugh, and the young champion said: "Well,

then----?"

"Well, then; she bolted with his secretary."

"Oh, I see." The champion's face fell.

"It didn't last long, though: I heard of her a few months later living

alone in Venice. I believe Lovell Mingott went out to get her. He said

she was desperately unhappy. That's all right--but this parading her at

the Opera's another thing."

"Perhaps," young Thorley hazarded, "she's too unhappy to be left at

home."

This was greeted with an irreverent laugh, and the youth blushed

deeply, and tried to look as if he had meant to insinuate what knowing

people called a "_double entendre_."

"Well--it's queer to have brought Miss Welland, anyhow," some one said

in a low tone, with a side-glance at Archer.

"Oh, that's part of the campaign: Granny's orders, no doubt," Lefferts

laughed. "When the old lady does a thing she does it thoroughly."

The act was ending, and there was a general stir in the box. Suddenly

Newland Archer felt himself impelled to decisive action. The desire

to be the first man to enter Mrs. Mingott's box, to proclaim to

the waiting world his engagement to May Welland, and to see her

through whatever difficulties her cousin's anomalous situation might

involve her in; this impulse had abruptly overruled all scruples and

hesitations, and sent him hurrying through the red corridors to the

farther side of the house.

As he entered the box his eyes met Miss Welland's, and he saw that she

had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which

both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so.

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications

and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other

without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any

explanation would have done. Her eyes said: "You see why Mamma brought

me," and his answered: "I would not for the world have had you stay

away."

"You know my niece Countess Olenska?" Mrs. Welland enquired as she

shook hands with her future son-in-law. Archer bowed without extending

his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady; and Ellen

Olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved hands

clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers. Having greeted Mrs. Lovell

Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his

betrothed, and said in a low tone: "I hope you've told Madame Olenska

that we're engaged? I want everybody to know--I want you to let me

announce it this evening at the ball."

Miss Welland's face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with

radiant eyes. "If you can persuade Mamma," she said; "but why should we

change what is already settled?" He made no answer but that which his

eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: "Tell my

cousin yourself: I give you leave. She says she used to play with you

when you were children."

She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a

little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see

what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska's side.

"We _did_ use to play together, didn't we?" she asked, turning her

grave eyes to his. "You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a

door; but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me,

that I was in love with." Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of

boxes. "Ah, how this brings it all back to me--I see everybody here in

knickerbockers and pantalettes," she said, with her trailing slightly

foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face.

Agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that they

should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before

which, at that very moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could

be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat

stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very long time."

"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure

I'm dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for

reasons he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more

disrespectful way of describing New York society.

III.

It invariably happened in the same way.

Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to

appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night

in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares,

and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every

detail of the entertainment in her absence.

The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed

a ball-room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott's and the Headly

Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought

"provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the

furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no

other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the

year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner

and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to

compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.

Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms,

had once said: "We all have our pet common people--" and though the

phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an

exclusive bosom. But the Beauforts were not exactly common; some people

said they were even worse. Mrs. Beaufort belonged indeed to one of

America's most honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina Dallas

(of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to New

York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was always

doing the wrong thing from the right motive. When one was related

to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a "_droit de cité_" (as Mr.

Sillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in New

York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius Beaufort?

The question was: who was Beaufort? He passed for an Englishman,

was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had

come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson

Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself

an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were

dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and

when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt

to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences.

But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two

years after young Mrs. Beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she

had the most distinguished house in New York. No one knew exactly how

the miracle was accomplished. She was indolent, passive, the caustic

even called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls,

growing younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned

in Mr. Beaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world

there without lifting her jewelled little finger. The knowing people

said it was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef

new dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for

the dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed

the after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote

to her friends. If he did, these domestic activities were privately

performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless

and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the

detachment of an invited guest, and saying: "My wife's gloxinias are a

marvel, aren't they? I believe she gets them out from Kew."

Mr. Beaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried

things off. It was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped"

to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had

been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest--though

New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral

standard--he carried everything before him, and all New York into his

drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they

were "going to the Beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if

they had said they were going to Mrs. Manson Mingott's, and with the

added satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks

and vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and

warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the

Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third

act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared,

New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to

foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball. The Beauforts

had been among the first people in New York to own their own red

velvet carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen,

under their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the

ball-room chairs. They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the

ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to

the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the

gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all

his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly

_coiffées_ when they left home.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that,

instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at

the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed

drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing

from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry,

and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and

tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold

bamboo.

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in

somewhat late. He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged

footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had

dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished

with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting

on their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests

whom Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson

drawing-room.

Archer was distinctly nervous. He had not gone back to his club after

the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine,

had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the

direction of the Beauforts' house. He was definitely afraid that the

Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny

Mingott's orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball.

From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake

that would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see

the thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his

betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.

Wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had

the audacity to hang "Love Victorious," the much-discussed nude of

Bouguereau) Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near

the ball-room door. Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond:

the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish

heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and

ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the glitter of

highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh _glacé_ gloves.

Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the

threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other

bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid

excitement. A group of young men and girls were gathered about her,

and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which

Mrs. Welland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified

approval. It was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of announcing

her engagement, while her mother affected the air of parental

reluctance considered suitable to the occasion.

Archer paused a moment. It was at his express wish that the

announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have

wished to have his happiness known. To proclaim it in the heat and

noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy

which should belong to things nearest the heart. His joy was so deep

that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he

would have liked to keep the surface pure too. It was something of a

satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feeling. Her eyes

fled to his beseechingly, and their look said: "Remember, we're doing

this because it's right."

No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's

breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been

represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska.

The group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles,

and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed

into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.

"Now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as

they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.

She made no answer. Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes

remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision.

"Dear," Archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him

that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room,

had in them something grave and sacramental. What a new life it was

going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one's side!

The dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into

the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and

camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips.

"You see I did as you asked me to," she said.

"Yes: I couldn't wait," he answered smiling. After a moment he added:

"Only I wish it hadn't had to be at a ball."

"Yes, I know." She met his glance comprehendingly. "But after all--even

here we're alone together, aren't we?"

"Oh, dearest--always!" Archer cried.

Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going

to say the right thing. The discovery made the cup of his bliss

overflow, and he went on gaily: "The worst of it is that I want to

kiss you and I can't." As he spoke he took a swift glance about the

conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching

her to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips. To counteract the

audacity of this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less

secluded part of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a

lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. She sat silent, and the world lay

like a sunlit valley at their feet.

"Did you tell my cousin Ellen?" she asked presently, as if she spoke

through a dream.

He roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so. Some

invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign

woman had checked the words on his lips.

"No--I hadn't the chance after all," he said, fibbing hastily.

"Ah." She looked disappointed, but gently resolved on gaining her

point. "You must, then, for I didn't either; and I shouldn't like her

to think--"

"Of course not. But aren't you, after all, the person to do it?"

She pondered on this. "If I'd done it at the right time, yes: but

now that there's been a delay I think you must explain that I'd

asked you to tell her at the Opera, before our speaking about it to

everybody here. Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her. You

see, she's one of the family, and she's been away so long that she's

rather--sensitive."

Archer looked at her glowingly. "Dear and great angel! Of course I'll

tell her." He glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded

ball-room. "But I haven't seen her yet. Has she come?"

"No; at the last minute she decided not to."

"At the last minute?" he echoed, betraying his surprise that she should

ever have considered the alternative possible.

"Yes. She's awfully fond of dancing," the young girl answered simply.

"But suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn't smart enough

for a ball, though we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take

her home."

"Oh, well--" said Archer with happy indifference. Nothing about his

betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to

its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they

had both been brought up.

"She knows as well as I do," he reflected, "the real reason of her

cousin's staying away; but I shall never let her see by the least sign

that I am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen

Olenska's reputation."

IV.

In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits

were exchanged. The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such

matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his

mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs.

Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that

venerable ancestress's blessing.

A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the

young man. The house in itself was already an historic document,

though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses

in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest

1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood

consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and

immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who

had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture

of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous

upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window

of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for

life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed

in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her

confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries,

the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and

the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before

the advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was

an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over

which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth

asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as

every one she cared to see came to _her_ (and she could fill her rooms

as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the

menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle

life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a

plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into

something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted

this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now,

in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost

unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which

the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight

of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy

bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature

portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave

of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with

two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it

impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic

independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established

herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the

ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room

window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a

looped-back yellow damask portière) the unexpected vista of a bedroom

with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with

frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.

Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this

arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural

incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed

of. That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies,

in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent

propinquities that their novels described. It amused Newland Archer

(who had secretly situated the love-scenes of "Monsieur de Camors"

in Mrs. Mingott's bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the

stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable

admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid

woman would have had him too.

To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her

grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple.

Mrs. Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring

sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate

thing for a compromised woman to do. But at any rate it spared them the

embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her unhappy

past might seem to shed on their radiant future. The visit went off

successfully, as was to have been expected. Old Mrs. Mingott was

delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by watchful

relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council; and the

engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws, met

with her unqualified admiration.

"It's the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it

looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes," Mrs. Welland had explained,

with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law.

"Old-fashioned eyes? I hope you don't mean mine, my dear? I like all

the novelties," said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small

bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured. "Very handsome,"

she added, returning the jewel; "very liberal. In my time a cameo set

in pearls was thought sufficient. But it's the hand that sets off the

ring, isn't it, my dear Mr. Archer?" and she waved one of her tiny

hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the

wrist like ivory bracelets. "Mine was modelled in Rome by the great

Ferrigiani. You should have May's done: no doubt he'll have it done,

my child. Her hand is large--it's these modern sports that spread the

joints--but the skin is white.--And when's the wedding to be?" she

broke off, fixing her eyes on Archer's face.

"Oh--" Mrs. Welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his

betrothed, replied: "As soon as ever it can, if only you'll back me up,

Mrs. Mingott."

"We must give them time to get to know each other a little better,

mamma," Mrs. Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of

reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: "Know each other?

Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody. Let the

young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off the

wine. Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and

I want to give the wedding-breakfast."

These successive statements were received with the proper expressions

of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up

in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess

Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected

figure of Julius Beaufort.

There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and Mrs.

Mingott held out Ferrigiani's model to the banker. "Ha! Beaufort, this

is a rare favour!" (She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by

their surnames.)

"Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener," said the visitor in his easy

arrogant way. "I'm generally so tied down; but I met the Countess Ellen

in Madison Square, and she was good enough to let me walk home with

her."

"Ah--I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen's here!" cried Mrs.

Mingott with a glorious effrontery. "Sit down--sit down, Beaufort: push

up the yellow armchair; now I've got you I want a good gossip. I hear

your ball was magnificent; and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel

Struthers? Well--I've a curiosity to see the woman myself."

She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall

under Ellen Olenska's guidance. Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed

a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of

kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the

conventions. Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the

Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the

widow of Struthers's Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year

from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight

little citadel of New York. "Of course if you and Regina invite her the

thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money--and I hear

she's still very good-looking," the carnivorous old lady declared.

In the hall, while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw

that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning

smile.

"Of course you know already--about May and me," he said, answering her

look with a shy laugh. "She scolded me for not giving you the news

last night at the Opera: I had her orders to tell you that we were

engaged--but I couldn't, in that crowd."

The smile passed from Countess Olenska's eyes to her lips: she looked

younger, more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood. "Of

course I know; yes. And I'm so glad. But one doesn't tell such things

first in a crowd." The ladies were on the threshold and she held out

her hand.

"Good-bye; come and see me some day," she said, still looking at Archer.

In the carriage, on the way down Fifth Avenue, they talked pointedly of

Mrs. Mingott, of her age, her spirit, and all her wonderful attributes.

No one alluded to Ellen Olenska; but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was

thinking: "It's a mistake for Ellen to be seen, the very day after

her arrival, parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour with Julius

Beaufort--" and the young man himself mentally added: "And she ought to

know that a man who's just engaged doesn't spend his time calling on

married women. But I daresay in the set she's lived in they do--they

never do anything else." And, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on

which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker,

and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.

V.

The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the

Archers.

Mrs. Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to

be well-informed as to its doings. Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson

applied to the investigation of his friends' affairs the patience of a

collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, Miss Sophy

Jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who

could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits of

minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.

Therefore, whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted to

know about, she asked Mr. Jackson to dine; and as she honoured few

people with her invitations, and as she and her daughter Janey were an

excellent audience, Mr. Jackson usually came himself instead of sending

his sister. If he could have dictated all the conditions, he would have

chosen the evenings when Newland was out; not because the young man was

uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because

the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Newland's part, a tendency to

weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.

Mr. Jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also

have asked that Mrs. Archer's food should be a little better. But then

New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided

into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and

all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and

the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel,

horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms

of pleasure.

You couldn't have everything, after all. If you dined with the Lovell

Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline

Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and "The Marble Faun";

and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape. Therefore when

a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer, Mr. Jackson, who was a true

eclectic, would usually say to his sister: "I've been a little gouty

since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts'--it will do me good to

diet at Adeline's."

Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter

in West Twenty-eighth Street. An upper floor was dedicated to Newland,

and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below.

In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns

in Wardian cases, made _macramé_ lace and wool embroidery on linen,

collected American revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to "Good

Words," and read Ouida's novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere.

(They preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions

of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked

novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more

comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who "had never drawn a

gentleman," and considered Thackeray less at home in the great world

than Bulwer--who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned.)

Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery. It was what

they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels

abroad; considering architecture and painting as subjects for men,

and chiefly for learned persons who read Ruskin. Mrs. Archer had been

born a Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters,

were both, as people said, "true Newlands"; tall, pale, and slightly

round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping

distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits. Their

physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint

had not stretched Mrs. Archer's black brocade, while Miss Archer's

brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more

slackly on her virgin frame.

Mentally, the likeness between them, as Newland was aware, was less

complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear. The long

habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given them

the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases

"Mother thinks" or "Janey thinks," according as one or the other wished

to advance an opinion of her own; but in reality, while Mrs. Archer's

serene unimaginativeness rested easily in the accepted and familiar,

Janey was subject to starts and aberrations of fancy welling up from

springs of suppressed romance.

Mother and daughter adored each other and revered their son and

brother; and Archer loved them with a tenderness made compunctious and

uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated admiration, and by his

secret satisfaction in it. After all, he thought it a good thing for a

man to have his authority respected in his own house, even if his sense

of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate.

On this occasion the young man was very sure that Mr. Jackson would

rather have had him dine out; but he had his own reasons for not doing

so.

Of course old Jackson wanted to talk about Ellen Olenska, and of course

Mrs. Archer and Janey wanted to hear what he had to tell. All three

would be slightly embarrassed by Newland's presence, now that his

prospective relation to the Mingott clan had been made known; and the

young man waited with an amused curiosity to see how they would turn

the difficulty.

They began, obliquely, by talking about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers.

"It's a pity the Beauforts asked her," Mrs. Archer said gently. "But

then Regina always does what he tells her; and _Beaufort_--"

"Certain _nuances_ escape Beaufort," said Mr. Jackson, cautiously

inspecting the broiled shad, and wondering for the thousandth time why

Mrs. Archer's cook always burnt the roe to a cinder. (Newland, who

had long shared his wonder, could always detect it in the older man's

expression of melancholy disapproval.)

"Oh, necessarily; Beaufort is a vulgar man," said Mrs. Archer. "My

grandfather Newland always used to say to my mother: 'Whatever you do,

don't let that fellow Beaufort be introduced to the girls.' But at

least he's had the advantage of associating with gentlemen; in England

too, they say. It's all very mysterious--" She glanced at Janey and

paused. She and Janey knew every fold of the Beaufort mystery, but in

public Mrs. Archer continued to assume that the subject was not one for

the unmarried.

"But this Mrs. Struthers," Mrs. Archer continued; "what did you say

_she_ was, Sillerton?"

"Out of a mine: or rather out of the saloon at the head of the pit.

Then with Living Wax-Works, touring New England. After the police broke

_that_ up, they say she lived--" Mr. Jackson in his turn glanced at

Janey, whose eyes began to bulge from under her prominent lids. There

were still hiatuses for her in Mrs. Struthers's past.

"Then," Mr. Jackson continued (and Archer saw he was wondering why no

one had told the butler never to slice cucumbers with a steel knife),

"then Lemuel Struthers came along. They say his advertiser used the

girl's head for the shoe-polish posters; her hair's intensely black,

you know--the Egyptian style. Anyhow, he--eventually--married her."

There were volumes of innuendo in the way the "eventually" was spaced,

and each syllable given its due stress.

"Oh, well--at the pass we've come to nowadays, it doesn't matter," said

Mrs. Archer indifferently. The ladies were not really interested in

Mrs. Struthers just then; the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh

and too absorbing to them. Indeed, Mrs. Struthers's name had been

introduced by Mrs. Archer only that she might presently be able to say:

"And Newland's new cousin--Countess Olenska? Was _she_ at the ball too?"

There was a faint touch of sarcasm in the reference to her son, and

Archer knew it and had expected it. Even Mrs. Archer, who was seldom

unduly pleased with human events, had been altogether glad of her

son's engagement. ("Especially after that silly business with Mrs.

Rushworth," as she had remarked to Janey, alluding to what had once

seemed to Newland a tragedy of which his soul would always bear the

scar.)

There was no better match in New York than May Welland, look at the

question from whatever point you chose. Of course such a marriage was

only what Newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and

incalculable--and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous--that it was

nothing short of a miracle to see one's only son safe past the Siren

Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.

All this Mrs. Archer felt, and her son knew she felt; but he knew

also that she had been perturbed by the premature announcement of his

engagement, or rather by its cause; and it was for that reason--because

on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master--that he had stayed

at home that evening. "It's not that I don't approve of the Mingotts'

_esprit de corps_; but why Newland's engagement should be mixed up with

that Olenska woman's comings and goings I don't see," Mrs. Archer

grumbled to Janey, the only witness of her slight lapses from perfect

sweetness.

She had behaved beautifully--and in beautiful behaviour she was

unsurpassed--during the call on Mrs. Welland; but Newland knew (and his

betrothed doubtless guessed) that all through the visit she and Janey

were nervously on the watch for Madame Olenska's possible intrusion;

and when they left the house together she had permitted herself to say

to her son: "I'm thankful that Augusta Welland received us alone."

These indications of inward disturbance moved Archer the more that he

too felt that the Mingotts had gone a little too far. But, as it was

against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever

allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts, he simply replied: "Oh,

well, there's always a phase of family parties to be gone through when

one gets engaged, and the sooner it's over the better." At which his

mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from

her grey velvet bonnet trimmed with frosted grapes.

Her revenge, he felt--her lawful revenge--would be to "draw" Mr.

Jackson that evening on the Countess Olenska; and, having publicly done

his duty as a future member of the Mingott clan, the young man had no

objection to hearing the lady discussed in private--except that the

subject was already beginning to bore him.

Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the

mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and

had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He

looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably

finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.

Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the candlelit

Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the

dark walls.

"Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!"

he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in

a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house

behind him. "Well--well--well ... I wonder what he would have said to

all these foreign marriages!"

Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and Mr.

Jackson continued with deliberation: "No, she was _not_ at the ball."

"Ah--" Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that implied: "She had that

decency."

"Perhaps the Beauforts don't know her," Janey suggested, with her

artless malice.

Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible

Madeira. "Mrs. Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does, for she

was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole

of New York."

"Mercy--" moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of

trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.

"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," Janey

speculated. "At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly

plain and flat--like a night-gown."

"Janey!" said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look

audacious.

"It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," Mrs.

Archer continued.

A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: "I don't think it was a

question of taste with her. May said she meant to go, and then decided

that the dress in question wasn't smart enough."

Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference. "Poor Ellen,"

she simply remarked; adding compassionately: "We must always bear in

mind what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her. What can you

expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out

ball?"

"Ah--don't I remember her in it!" said Mr. Jackson; adding: "Poor

girl!" in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory, had fully

understood at the time what the sight portended.

"It's odd," Janey remarked, "that she should have kept such an ugly

name as Ellen. I should have changed it to Elaine." She glanced about

the table to see the effect of this.

Her brother laughed. "Why Elaine?"

"I don't know; it sounds more--more Polish," said Janey, blushing.

"It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes,"

said Mrs. Archer distantly.

"Why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative. "Why

shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink

about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? She's 'poor Ellen'

certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage;

but I don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were

the culprit."

"That, I suppose," said Mr. Jackson, speculatively, "is the line the

Mingotts mean to take."

The young man reddened. "I didn't have to wait for their cue, if that's

what you mean, sir. Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that

doesn't make her an outcast."

"There are rumours," began Mr. Jackson, glancing at Janey.

"Oh, I know: the secretary," the young man took him up. "Nonsense,

mother; Janey's grown-up. They say, don't they," he went on, "that the

secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept

her practically a prisoner? Well, what if he did? I hope there isn't a

man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case."

Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler:

"Perhaps ... that sauce ... just a little, after all--"; then, having

helped himself, he remarked: "I'm told she's looking for a house. She

means to live here."

"I hear she means to get a divorce," said Janey boldly.

"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.

The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil

atmosphere of the Archer dining-room. Mrs. Archer raised her delicate

eye-brows in the particular curve that signified: "The butler--" and

the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such

intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his

visit to old Mrs. Mingott.

After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs. Archer and Janey

trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing-room, where, while

the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with

an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood work-table with

a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry

band of field-flowers destined to adorn an "occasional" chair in the

drawing-room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.

While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room, Archer settled Mr.

Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed

him a cigar. Mr. Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit

his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them),

and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said: "You say the

secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow? Well, he was

still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met 'em living at

Lausanne together."

Newland reddened. "Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right

to make her life over if she hadn't? I'm sick of the hypocrisy that

would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with

harlots."

He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. "Women ought to

be free--as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which

he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted

a sardonic whistle.

"Well," he said after a pause, "apparently Count Olenski takes your

view; for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife

back."

VI.

That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies

had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted

thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept

the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and

rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on

the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked

singularly home-like and welcoming.

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a

large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him

in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all

the other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at

the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young

creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying product

of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl

who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a

stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was

borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been

taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled

convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His

own exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck

to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard

as non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim

the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself

were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready

to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a

humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things

together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was

pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct

that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on

her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was

purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it

was absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he _were_.

But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case

and May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.

What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,

as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a

marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one

of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should

tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed

his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that

answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which

he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived

that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the

versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully

trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his

marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a

dull association of material and social interests held together by

ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. Lawrence Lefferts

occurred to him as the husband who had most completely realised this

enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife

so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous

moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's wives, she

went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence was so

frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert

her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius

Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had what was

known in New York as "another establishment."

Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not

quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor

Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and

not of standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic

world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but

only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland,

who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's

engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no

less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having

had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that

people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is

dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of

this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable

for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling,

because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing

to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this,

she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the

facts of life."

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the

radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,

her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and

ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She had

advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,

but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was

straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly

proved by her laughing at _his_ jokes); and he suspected, in the depths

of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a

joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned

discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were

only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and

innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive

guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious

purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts

and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed

to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might

exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those

habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But they

were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement

of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as

Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a

blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she

was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had

been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find

their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his

anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected

with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)

why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of

experience as himself.

Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his

mind; but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and

precision were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska.

Here he was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure

thoughts and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which

raised all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie.

"Hang Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to

undress. He could not really see why her fate should have the least

bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to

measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced

upon him.

A few days later the bolt fell.

The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal

dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and

a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the

words "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the hospitable

American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or

at least as their ambassadors.

The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in

which the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.

Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who

were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts,

on whom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson

and his sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to),

were some of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the

dominant "young married" set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts

Rushworth (the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses

and young Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The

company indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged

to the little inner group of people who, during the long New York

season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently

undiminished zest.

Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had

refused the Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr.

Jackson and his sister. The intended slight was emphasised by the fact

that even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were

among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in

all of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept,"

without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary

courtesy prescribed.

New York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in

its resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers,

butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were

free; and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell

Mingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not to

meet the Countess Olenska.

The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met it

gallantly. Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who

confided it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed

passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful

period of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his

instances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause with

an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet

bonnet and said: "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."

The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,

in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.

At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called "plain

people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who

(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had

been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.

People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used to

be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, and

Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions to

last much longer.

Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum

was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands,

Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined

them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least

those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the

professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could

lay claim to that eminence.

"Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this

modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one,

neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the Newlands

or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were

just respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies

to make their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well. One

of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another was a

general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword

after the battle of Saratoga. These are things to be proud of, but

they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a

commercial community, and there are not more than three families in it

who can claim an aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."

Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York,

knew who these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of Washington

Square, who came of an old English county family allied with the Pitts

and Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants of

Count de Grasse, and the van der Luydens, direct descendants of the

first Dutch governor of Manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionary

marriages to several members of the French and British aristocracy.

The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively

Miss Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family

portraits and Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan,

allied to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van

der Luydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind of

super-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressively

emerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother had

been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island

family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,

after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter

of the Earl of St. Austrey. The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacs

of Maryland, and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas,

had always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden

had more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house

of Trevenna, the Duke of St. Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall

and at St. Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently

announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the

Duchess, who feared the Atlantic).

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, their

place in Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson

which had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to

the famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still

"Patroon." Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom

opened, and when they came to town they received in it only their most

intimate friends.

"I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenly

pausing at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa is fond of you; and of

course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and also

because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as

Society left."

VII.

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to her cousin Mrs.

Archer's narrative.

It was all very well to tell yourself in advance that Mrs. van der

Luyden was always silent, and that, though non-committal by nature

and training, she was very kind to the people she really liked. Even

personal experience of these facts was not always a protection from the

chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged white-walled Madison

Avenue drawing-room, with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously

uncovered for the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu

mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of Gainsborough's

"Lady Angelica du Lac."

Mrs. van der Luyden's portrait by Huntington (in black velvet and

Venetian point) faced that of her lovely ancestress. It was generally

considered "as fine as a Cabanel," and, though twenty years had elapsed

since its execution, was still "a perfect likeness." Indeed the Mrs.

van der Luyden who sat beneath it listening to Mrs. Archer might have

been the twin-sister of the fair and still youngish woman drooping

against a gilt armchair before a green rep curtain. Mrs. van der

Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when she went into

society--or rather (since she never dined out) when she threw open her

own doors to receive it. Her fair hair, which had faded without turning

grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead,

and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a

little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been

painted. She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been

rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly

irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a

rosy life-in-death.

Like all his family, he esteemed and admired Mrs. van der Luyden;

but he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the

grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said

"No" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked.

Mrs. van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always

appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the

shadow of a smile, made the almost invariable reply: "I shall first

have to talk this over with my husband."

She and Mr. van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often

wondered how, after forty years of the closest conjugality, two such

merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as

controversial as a talking-over. But as neither had ever reached a

decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave, Mrs. Archer

and her son, having set forth their case, waited resignedly for the

familiar phrase.

Mrs. van der Luyden, however, who had seldom surprised any one, now

surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell-rope.

"I think," she said, "I should like Henry to hear what you have told

me."

A footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: "If Mr. van der Luyden

has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to

come."

She said "reading the newspaper" in the tone in which a Minister's

wife might have said: "Presiding at a Cabinet meeting"--not from any

arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a life-time, and the

attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider Mr. van

der Luyden's least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.

Her promptness of action showed that she considered the case as

pressing as Mrs. Archer; but, lest she should be thought to have

committed herself in advance, she added, with the sweetest look:

"Henry always enjoys seeing you, dear Adeline; and he will wish to

congratulate Newland."

The double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared Mr.

Henry van der Luyden, tall, spare and frock-coated, with faded fair

hair, a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen

gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue.

Mr. van der Luyden greeted Mrs. Archer with cousinly affability,

proffered to Newland low-voiced congratulations couched in the same

language as his wife's, and seated himself in one of the brocade

armchairs with the simplicity of a reigning sovereign.

"I had just finished reading the Times," he said, laying his long

finger-tips together. "In town my mornings are so much occupied that I

find it more convenient to read the newspapers after luncheon."

"Ah, there's a great deal to be said for that plan--indeed I think my

uncle Egmont used to say he found it less agitating not to read the

morning papers till after dinner," said Mrs. Archer responsively.

"Yes: my good father abhorred hurry. But now we live in a constant

rush," said Mr. van der Luyden in measured tones, looking with pleasant

deliberation about the large shrouded room which to Archer was so

complete an image of its owners.

"But I hope you _had_ finished your reading, Henry?" his wife

interposed.

"Quite--quite," he reassured her.

"Then I should like Adeline to tell you--"

"Oh, it's really Newland's story," said his mother smiling; and

proceeded to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront

inflicted on Mrs. Lovell Mingott.

"Of course," she ended, "Augusta Welland and Mary Mingott both felt

that, especially in view of Newland's engagement, you and Henry _ought

to know_."

"Ah--" said Mr. van der Luyden, drawing a deep breath.

There was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu

clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a

minute-gun. Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures,

seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity, mouthpieces of

some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield,

when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion,

digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff, and

playing Patience together in the evenings.

Mr. van der Luyden was the first to speak.

"You really think this is due to some--some intentional interference of

Lawrence Lefferts's?" he enquired, turning to Archer.

"I'm certain of it, sir. Larry has been going it rather harder than

usual lately--if cousin Louisa won't mind my mentioning it--having

rather a stiff affair with the postmaster's wife in their village, or

some one of that sort; and whenever poor Gertrude Lefferts begins to

suspect anything, and he's afraid of trouble, he gets up a fuss of

this kind, to show how awfully moral he is, and talks at the top of

his voice about the impertinence of inviting his wife to meet people

he doesn't wish her to know. He's simply using Madame Olenska as a

lightning-rod; I've seen him try the same thing often before."

"The _Leffertses_!--" said Mrs. van der Luyden.

"The _Leffertses_!--" echoed Mrs. Archer. "What would uncle Egmont have

said of Lawrence Lefferts's pronouncing on anybody's social position?

It shows what Society has come to."

"We'll hope it has not quite come to that," said Mr. van der Luyden

firmly.

"Ah, if only you and Louisa went out more!" sighed Mrs. Archer.

But instantly she became aware of her mistake. The van der Luydens were

morbidly sensitive to any criticism of their secluded existence. They

were the arbiters of fashion, the Court of last Appeal, and they knew

it, and bowed to their fate. But being shy and retiring persons, with

no natural inclination for their part, they lived as much as possible

in the sylvan solitude of Skuytercliff, and when they came to town,

declined all invitations on the plea of Mrs. van der Luyden's health.

Newland Archer came to his mother's rescue. "Everybody in New York

knows what you and cousin Louisa represent. That's why Mrs. Mingott

felt she ought not to allow this slight on Countess Olenska to pass

without consulting you."

Mrs. van der Luyden glanced at her husband, who glanced back at her.

"It is the principle that I dislike," said Mr. van der Luyden. "As

long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it

should be considered--final."

"It seems so to me," said his wife, as if she were producing a new

thought.

"I had no idea," Mr. van der Luyden continued, "that things had

come to such a pass." He paused, and looked at his wife again. "It

occurs to me, my dear, that the Countess Olenska is already a sort of

relation--through Medora Manson's first husband. At any rate, she will

be when Newland marries." He turned toward the young man. "Have you

read this morning's Times, Newland?"

"Why, yes, sir," said Archer, who usually tossed off half a dozen

papers with his morning coffee.

Husband and wife looked at each other again. Their pale eyes clung

together in prolonged and serious consultation; then a faint smile

fluttered over Mrs. van der Luyden's face. She had evidently guessed

and approved.

Mr. van der Luyden turned to Mrs. Archer. "If Louisa's health allowed

her to dine out--I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott--she

and I would have been happy to--er--fill the places of the Lawrence

Leffertses at her dinner." He paused to let the irony of this sink in.

"As you know, this is impossible." Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic

assent. "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times;

therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St.

Austrey, arrives next week on the Russia. He is coming to enter his

new sloop, the Guinevere, in next summer's International Cup Race; and

also to have a little canvasback shooting at Trevenna." Mr. van der

Luyden paused again, and continued with increasing benevolence: "Before

taking him down to Maryland we are inviting a few friends to meet him

here--only a little dinner--with a reception afterward. I am sure

Louisa will be as glad as I am if Countess Olenska will let us include

her among our guests." He got up, bent his long body with a stiff

friendliness toward his cousin, and added: "I think I have Louisa's

authority for saying that she will herself leave the invitation to

dine when she drives out presently: with our cards--of course with our

cards."

Mrs. Archer, who knew this to be a hint that the seventeen-hand

chestnuts which were never kept waiting were at the door, rose with a

hurried murmur of thanks. Mrs. van der Luyden beamed on her with the

smile of Esther interceding with Ahasuerus; but her husband raised a

protesting hand.

"There is nothing to thank me for, dear Adeline; nothing whatever. This

kind of thing must not happen in New York; it shall not, as long as I

can help it," he pronounced with sovereign gentleness as he steered his

cousins to the door.

Two hours later, every one knew that the great C-spring barouche in

which Mrs. van der Luyden took the air at all seasons had been seen at

old Mrs. Mingott's door, where a large square envelope was handed in;

and that evening at the Opera Mr. Sillerton Jackson was able to state

that the envelope contained a card inviting the Countess Olenska to the

dinner which the van der Luydens were giving the following week for

their cousin, the Duke of St. Austrey.

Some of the younger men in the club box exchanged a smile at this

announcement, and glanced sideways at Lawrence Lefferts, who sat

carelessly in the front of the box, pulling his long fair moustache,

and who remarked with authority, as the soprano paused: "No one but

Patti ought to attempt the Sonnambula."

VIII.

It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had "lost

her looks."

She had appeared there first, in Newland Archer's boyhood, as a

brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten, of whom people said that

she "ought to be painted." Her parents had been continental wanderers,

and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both, and been taken in

charge by her aunt, Medora Manson, also a wanderer, who was herself

returning to New York to "settle down."

Poor Medora, repeatedly widowed, was always coming home to settle down

(each time in a less expensive house), and bringing with her a new

husband or an adopted child; but after a few months she invariably

parted from her husband or quarrelled with her ward, and, having got

rid of her house at a loss, set out again on her wanderings. As her

mother had been a Rushworth, and her last unhappy marriage had linked

her to one of the crazy Chiverses, New York looked indulgently on her

eccentricities; but when she returned with her little orphaned niece,

whose parents had been popular in spite of their regrettable taste for

travel, people thought it a pity that the pretty child should be in

such hands.

Every one was disposed to be kind to little Ellen Mingott, though her

dusky red cheeks and tight curls gave her an air of gaiety that seemed

unsuitable in a child who should still have been in black for her

parents. It was one of the misguided Medora's many peculiarities to

flout the unalterable rules that regulated American mourning, and when

she stepped from the steamer her family were scandalised to see that

the crape veil she wore for her own brother was seven inches shorter

than those of her sisters-in-law, while little Ellen was in crimson

merino and amber beads, like a gipsy foundling.

But New York had so long resigned itself to Medora that only a few old

ladies shook their heads over Ellen's gaudy clothes, while her other

relations fell under the charm of her high colour and high spirits.

She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting

questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts,

such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs

to a guitar. Under the direction of her aunt (whose real name was Mrs.

Thorley Chivers, but who, having received a Papal title, had resumed

her first husband's patronymic, and called herself the Marchioness

Manson, because in Italy she could turn it into Manzoni) the little

girl received an expensive but incoherent education, which included

"drawing from the model," a thing never dreamed of before, and playing

the piano in quintets with professional musicians.

Of course no good could come of this; and when, a few years later,

poor Chivers finally died in a madhouse, his widow (draped in strange

weeds) again pulled up stakes and departed with Ellen, who had grown

into a tall bony girl with conspicuous eyes. For some time no more was

heard of them; then news came of Ellen's marriage to an immensely rich

Polish nobleman of legendary fame, whom she had met at a ball at the

Tuileries, and who was said to have princely establishments in Paris,

Nice and Florence, a yacht at Cowes, and many square miles of shooting

in Transylvania. She disappeared in a kind of sulphurous apotheosis,

and when a few years later Medora again came back to New York, subdued,

impoverished, mourning a third husband, and in quest of a still smaller

house, people wondered that her rich niece had not been able to do

something for her. Then came the news that Ellen's own marriage had

ended in disaster, and that she was herself returning home to seek rest

and oblivion among her kinsfolk.

These things passed through Newland Archer's mind a week later as he

watched the Countess Olenska enter the van der Luyden drawing-room on

the evening of the momentous dinner. The occasion was a solemn one,

and he wondered a little nervously how she would carry it off. She

came rather late, one hand still ungloved, and fastening a bracelet

about her wrist; yet she entered without any appearance of haste or

embarrassment the drawing-room in which New York's most chosen company

was somewhat awfully assembled.

In the middle of the room she paused, looking about her with a grave

mouth and smiling eyes; and in that instant Newland Archer rejected

the general verdict on her looks. It was true that her early radiance

was gone. The red cheeks had paled; she was thin, worn, a little

older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty. But

there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in

the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without

being in the least theatrical, struck him as highly trained and full

of a conscious power. At the same time she was simpler in manner than

most of the ladies present, and many people (as he heard afterward

from Janey) were disappointed that her appearance was not more

"stylish"--for stylishness was what New York most valued. It was,

perhaps, Archer reflected, because her early vivacity had disappeared;

because she was so quiet--quiet in her movements, her voice, and the

tones of her low-pitched voice. New York had expected something a good

deal more resonant in a young woman with such a history.

The dinner was a somewhat formidable business. Dining with the van

der Luydens was at best no light matter, and dining there with a Duke

who was their cousin was almost a religious solemnity. It pleased

Archer to think that only an old New Yorker could perceive the shade

of difference (to New York) between being merely a Duke and being the

van der Luydens' Duke. New York took stray noblemen calmly, and even

(except in the Struthers set) with a certain distrustful hauteur; but

when they presented such credentials as these they were received with

an old-fashioned cordiality that they would have been greatly mistaken

in ascribing solely to their standing in Debrett. It was for just such

distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while

he smiled at it.

The van der Luydens had done their best to emphasise the importance

of the occasion. The du Lac Sevres and the Trevenna George II plate

were out; so was the van der Luyden "Lowestoft" (East India Company)

and the Dagonet Crown Derby. Mrs. van der Luyden looked more than ever

like a Cabanel, and Mrs. Archer, in her grandmother's seed-pearls and

emeralds, reminded her son of an Isabey miniature. All the ladies had

on their handsomest jewels, but it was characteristic of the house

and the occasion that these were mostly in rather heavy old-fashioned

settings; and old Miss Lanning, who had been persuaded to come,

actually wore her mother's cameos and a Spanish blonde shawl.

The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as

Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond

necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously

immature compared with hers. It frightened him to think what must have

gone to the making of her eyes.

The Duke of St. Austrey, who sat at his hostess's right, was naturally

the chief figure of the evening. But if the Countess Olenska was less

conspicuous than had been hoped, the Duke was almost invisible. Being

a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to

the dinner in a shooting-jacket; but his evening clothes were so shabby

and baggy, and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun,

that (with his stooping way of sitting, and the vast beard spreading

over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner

attire. He was short, round-shouldered, sunburnt, with a thick nose,

small eyes and a sociable smile; but he seldom spoke, and when he

did it was in such low tones that, despite the frequent silences of

expectation about the table, his remarks were lost to all but his

neighbours.

When the men joined the ladies after dinner the Duke went straight up

to the Countess Olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged

into animated talk. Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first

have paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers,

and the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr.

Urban Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure

of meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out

between January and April. The two chatted together for nearly twenty

minutes; then the Countess rose and, walking alone across the wide

drawing-room, sat down at Newland Archer's side.

It was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms for a lady to get

up and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of

another. Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an idol,

while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each other at

her side. But the Countess was apparently unaware of having broken any

rule; she sat at perfect ease in a corner of the sofa beside Archer,

and looked at him with the kindest eyes.

"I want you to talk to me about May," she said.

Instead of answering her he asked: "You knew the Duke before?"

"Oh, yes--we used to see him every winter at Nice. He's very fond of

gambling--he used to come to the house a great deal." She said it in

the simplest manner, as if she had said: "He's fond of wild-flowers";

and after a moment she added candidly: "I think he's the dullest man I

ever met."

This pleased her companion so much that he forgot the slight shock her

previous remark had caused him. It was undeniably exciting to meet a

lady who found the van der Luydens' Duke dull, and dared to utter the

opinion. He longed to question her, to hear more about the life of

which her careless words had given him so illuminating a glimpse; but

he feared to touch on distressing memories, and before he could think

of anything to say she had strayed back to her original subject.

"May is a darling; I've seen no young girl in New York so handsome and

so intelligent. Are you very much in love with her?"

Newland Archer reddened and laughed. "As much as a man can be."

She continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not to miss any shade

of meaning in what he said, "Do you think, then, there is a limit?"

"To being in love? If there is, I haven't found it!"

She glowed with sympathy. "Ah--it's really and truly a romance?"

"The most romantic of romances!"

"How delightful! And you found it all out for yourselves--it was not in

the least arranged for you?"

Archer looked at her incredulously. "Have you forgotten," he asked

with a smile, "that in our country we don't allow our marriages to be

arranged for us?"

A dusky blush rose to her cheek, and he instantly regretted his words.

"Yes," she answered, "I'd forgotten. You must forgive me if I sometimes

make these mistakes. I don't always remember that everything here is

good that was--that was bad where I've come from." She looked down at

her Viennese fan of eagle feathers, and he saw that her lips trembled.

"I'm so sorry," he said impulsively; "but you _are_ among friends here,

you know."

"Yes--I know. Wherever I go I have that feeling. That's why I came

home. I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American

again, like the Mingotts and Wellands, and you and your delightful

mother, and all the other good people here tonight. Ah, here's May

arriving, and you will want to hurry away to her," she added, but

without moving; and her eyes turned back from the door to rest on the

young man's face.

The drawing-rooms were beginning to fill up with after-dinner guests,

and following Madame Olenska's glance Archer saw May Welland entering

with her mother. In her dress of white and silver, with a wreath of

silver blossoms in her hair, the tall girl looked like a Diana just

alight from the chase.

"Oh," said Archer, "I have so many rivals; you see she's already

surrounded. There's the Duke being introduced."

"Then stay with me a little longer," Madame Olenska said in a low tone,

just touching his knee with her plumed fan. It was the lightest touch,

but it thrilled him like a caress.

"Yes, let me stay," he answered in the same tone, hardly knowing what

he said; but just then Mr. van der Luyden came up, followed by old

Mr. Urban Dagonet. The Countess greeted them with her grave smile,

and Archer, feeling his host's admonitory glance on him, rose and

surrendered his seat.

Madame Olenska held out her hand as if to bid him goodbye.

"Tomorrow, then, after five--I shall expect you," she said; and then

turned back to make room for Mr. Dagonet.

"Tomorrow--" Archer heard himself repeating, though there had been no

engagement, and during their talk she had given him no hint that she

wished to see him again.

As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall and resplendent,

leading his wife up to be introduced; and heard Gertrude Lefferts

say, as she beamed on the Countess with her large unperceiving smile:

"But I think we used to go to dancing-school together when we were

children--." Behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the

Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had

declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott's. As Mrs. Archer remarked:

when the van der Luydens chose, they knew how to give a lesson. The

wonder was that they chose so seldom.

The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs. van der Luyden

looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the

family diamonds. "It was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself

so unselfishly to Madame Olenska. I told your cousin Henry he must

really come to the rescue."

He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if

condescending to his natural shyness: "I've never seen May looking

lovelier. The Duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room."

IX.

The Countess Olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour

Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant

wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired,

far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora.

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small

dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest

neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised

a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a

writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now

and then, had mentioned that he lived. Winsett did not invite people

to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course

of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little

shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Madame Olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance

only by a little more paint about the window-frames; and as Archer

mustered its modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must

have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day. He had lunched with the

Wellands, hoping afterward to carry off May for a walk in the Park.

He wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had

looked the night before, and how proud he was of her, and to press her

to hasten their marriage. But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him that

the round of family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted at

advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful eye-brows and

sighed out: "Twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--"

Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to

another, and Archer, when the afternoon's round was over, parted from

his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild

animal cunningly trapped. He supposed that his readings in anthropology

caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple

and natural demonstration of family feeling; but when he remembered

that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take place till the

following autumn, and pictured what his life would be till then, a

dampness fell upon his spirit.

"Tomorrow," Mrs. Welland called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and

the Dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two

families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter

of the alphabet.

He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska's request--her

command, rather--that he should call on her that afternoon; but in the

brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to

say. Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the matter.

He knew that May most particularly wanted him to be kind to her cousin;

was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of their

engagement? It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but for the

Countess's arrival, he might have been, if not still a free man, at

least a man less irrevocably pledged. But May had willed it so, and he

felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and therefore

at liberty, if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling her.

As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost

feeling. He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him; he

concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent

bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian.

She welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries

by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall

into a low firelit drawing-room. The room was empty, and she left him,

for an appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to find her

mistress, or whether she had not understood what he was there for, and

thought it might be to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the

only visible specimen had stopped. He knew that the southern races

communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was

mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible. At length

she returned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together

a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer: "La signora e

fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean: "She's out--but you'll

soon see."

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded

shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known. He knew that the

Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of

wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed, were represented

by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek

bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the

discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in

old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art. His

boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest

books: John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of

P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called "The Renaissance" by

Walter Pater. He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico

with a faint condescension. But these pictures bewildered him, for they

were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and therefore able

to see) when he travelled in Italy; and perhaps, also, his powers of

observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this

strange empty house, where apparently no one expected him. He was sorry

that he had not told May Welland of Countess Olenska's request, and a

little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in to see

her cousin. What would she think if she found him sitting there with

the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady's

fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and

stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him;

but Archer felt more curious than mortified. The atmosphere of the room

was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness

vanished in the sense of adventure. He had been before in drawing-rooms

hung with red damask, with pictures "of the Italian school"; what

struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's shabby hired house,

with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes,

had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a few properties,

been transformed into something intimate, "foreign," subtly suggestive

of old romantic scenes and sentiments. He tried to analyse the trick,

to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped,

in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever

bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his

elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put

on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a

smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what May's drawing-room

would look like. He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very

handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East

Thirty-ninth Street. The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the

house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger

architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone

of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce;

but the plumbing was perfect. Archer would have liked to travel, to

put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an

extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were

firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple. The young man

felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up

every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow

doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a

wainscoting of varnished yellow wood. But beyond that his imagination

could not travel. He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but

he could not fancy how May would deal with it. She submitted cheerfully

to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland drawing-room,

to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe. He saw

no reason to suppose that she would want anything different in her own

house; and his only comfort was to reflect that she would probably let

him arrange his library as he pleased--which would be, of course, with

"sincere" Eastlake furniture, and the plain new bookcases without glass

doors.

The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log,

and said consolingly: "Verra--verra." When she had gone Archer stood

up and began to wander about. Should he wait any longer? His position

was becoming rather foolish. Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame

Olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all.

Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's

hoofs; they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a

carriage door. Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk.

A street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort's

compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan, and the banker

descending from it, and helping out Madame Olenska.

Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion

seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his

carriage while she mounted the steps.

When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer

there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.

"How do you like my funny house?" she asked. "To me it's like heaven."

As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away

with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.

"You've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness

of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming

desire to be simple and striking.

"Oh, it's a poor little place. My relations despise it. But at any rate

it's less gloomy than the van der Luydens'."

The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious

spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der

Luydens gloomy. Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke

of it as "handsome." But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice

to the general shiver.

"It's delicious--what you've done here," he repeated.

"I like the little house," she admitted; "but I suppose what I like is

the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town;

and then, of being alone in it." She spoke so low that he hardly heard

the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.

"You like so much to be alone?"

"Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely." She sat down

near the fire, said: "Nastasia will bring the tea presently," and

signed to him to return to his armchair, adding: "I see you've already

chosen your corner."

Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the

fire under drooping lids.

"This is the hour I like best--don't you?"

A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: "I was afraid you'd

forgotten the hour. Beaufort must have been very engrossing."

She looked amused. "Why--have you waited long? Mr. Beaufort took me to

see a number of houses--since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay in

this one." She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from her

mind, and went on: "I've never been in a city where there seems to be

such a feeling against living in _des quartiers excentriques_. What does

it matter where one lives? I'm told this street is respectable."

"It's not fashionable."

"Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one's own

fashions? But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate, I

want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe."

He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her

need of guidance.

"That's what your friends want you to feel. New York's an awfully safe

place," he added with a flash of sarcasm.

"Yes, isn't it? One feels that," she cried, missing the mockery. "Being

here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a good

little girl and done all one's lessons."

The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him. He did

not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one

else take the same tone. He wondered if she did not begin to see what a

powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her. The Lovell

Mingotts' dinner, patched up in extremis out of all sorts of social

odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her escape;

but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster,

or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der Luyden

evening. Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied that her New

York was still completely undifferentiated, and the conjecture nettled

him.

"Last night," he said, "New York laid itself out for you. The van der

Luydens do nothing by halves."

"No: how kind they are! It was such a nice party. Every one seems to

have such an esteem for them."

The terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a

tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings'.

"The van der Luydens," said Archer, feeling himself pompous as

he spoke, "are the most powerful influence in New York society.

Unfortunately--owing to her health--they receive very seldom."

She unclasped her hands from behind her head, and looked at him

meditatively.

"Isn't that perhaps the reason?"

"The reason--?"

"For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare."

He coloured a little, stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration

of the remark. At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and they

collapsed. He laughed, and sacrificed them.

Nastasia brought the tea, with handleless Japanese cups and little

covered dishes, placing the tray on a low table.

"But you'll explain these things to me--you'll tell me all I ought to

know," Madame Olenska continued, leaning forward to hand him his cup.

"It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at

so long that I'd ceased to see them."

She detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets,

held it out to him, and took a cigarette herself. On the chimney were

long spills for lighting them.

"Ah, then we can both help each other. But I want help so much more.

You must tell me just what to do."

It was on the tip of his tongue to reply: "Don't be seen driving about

the streets with Beaufort--" but he was being too deeply drawn into the

atmosphere of the room, which was her atmosphere, and to give advice

of that sort would have been like telling some one who was bargaining

for attar-of-roses in Samarkand that one should always be provided with

arctics for a New York winter. New York seemed much farther off than

Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering

what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look

at his native city objectively. Viewed thus, as through the wrong end

of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then

from Samarkand it would.

A flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her

thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails.

The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her

braids, and made her pale face paler.

"There are plenty of people to tell you what to do," Archer rejoined,

obscurely envious of them.

"Oh--all my aunts? And my dear old Granny?" She considered the idea

impartially. "They're all a little vexed with me for setting up for

myself--poor Granny especially. She wanted to keep me with her; but I

had to be free--" He was impressed by this light way of speaking of the

formidable Catherine, and moved by the thought of what must have given

Madame Olenska this thirst for even the loneliest kind of freedom. But

the idea of Beaufort gnawed him.

"I think I understand how you feel," he said. "Still, your family can

advise you; explain differences; show you the way."

She lifted her thin black eyebrows. "Is New York such a labyrinth? I

thought it so straight up and down--like Fifth Avenue. And with all the

cross streets numbered!" She seemed to guess his faint disapproval of

this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face: "If

you knew how I like it for just _that_--the straight-up-and-downness,

and the big honest labels on everything!"

He saw his chance. "Everything may be labelled--but everybody is not."

"Perhaps. I may simplify too much--but you'll warn me if I do." She

turned from the fire to look at him. "There are only two people here

who make me feel as if they understood what I mean and could explain

things to me: you and Mr. Beaufort."

Archer winced at the joining of the names, and then, with a quick

readjustment, understood, sympathised and pitied. So close to the

powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely

in their air. But since she felt that he understood her also, his

business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all

he represented--and abhor it.

He answered gently: "I understand. But just at first don't let go of

your old friends' hands: I mean the older women, your Granny Mingott,

Mrs. Welland, Mrs. van der Luyden. They like and admire you--they want

to help you."

She shook her head and sighed. "Oh, I know--I know! But on condition

that they don't hear anything unpleasant. Aunt Welland put it in those

very words when I tried.... Does no one want to know the truth here,

Mr. Archer? The real loneliness is living among all these kind people

who only ask one to pretend!" She lifted her hands to her face, and he

saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob.

"Madame Olenska!--Oh, don't, Ellen," he cried, starting up and bending

over her. He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like a

child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed

herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes.

"Does no one cry here, either? I suppose there's no need to, in

heaven," she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh, and

bending over the tea-kettle. It was burnt into his consciousness that

he had called her "Ellen"--called her so twice; and that she had not

noticed it. Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white

figure of May Welland--in New York.

Suddenly Nastasia put her head in to say something in her rich Italian.

Madame Olenska, again with a hand at her hair, uttered an exclamation

of assent--a flashing "Gia--gia"--and the Duke of St. Austrey entered,

piloting a tremendous black-wigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing

furs.

"My dear Countess, I've brought an old friend of mine to see you--Mrs.

Struthers. She wasn't asked to the party last night, and she wants to

know you."

The Duke beamed on the group, and Madame Olenska advanced with a

murmur of welcome toward the queer couple. She seemed to have no idea

how oddly matched they were, nor what a liberty the Duke had taken in

bringing his companion--and to do him justice, as Archer perceived, the

Duke seemed as unaware of it himself.

"Of course I want to know you, my dear," cried Mrs. Struthers in a

round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig.

"I want to know everybody who's young and interesting and charming.

And the Duke tells me you like music--didn't you, Duke? You're a

pianist yourself, I believe? Well, do you want to hear Sarasate play

tomorrow evening at my house? You know I've something going on every

Sunday evening--it's the day when New York doesn't know what to do with

itself, and so I say to it: 'Come and be amused.' And the Duke thought

you'd be tempted by Sarasate. You'll find a number of your friends."

Madame Olenska's face grew brilliant with pleasure. "How kind! How good

of the Duke to think of me!" She pushed a chair up to the tea-table and

Mrs. Struthers sank into it delectably. "Of course I shall be too happy

to come."

"That's all right, my dear. And bring your young gentleman with you."

Mrs. Struthers extended a hail-fellow hand to Archer. "I can't put a

name to you--but I'm sure I've met you--I've met everybody, here, or in

Paris or London. Aren't you in diplomacy? All the diplomatists come to

me. You like music too? Duke, you must be sure to bring him."

The Duke said "Rather" from the depths of his beard, and Archer

withdrew with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of

spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and unnoticing

elders.

He was not sorry for the denouement of his visit: he only wished it had

come sooner, and spared him a certain waste of emotion. As he went out

into the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent, and May

Welland the loveliest woman in it. He turned into his florist's to send

her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion, he

found he had forgotten that morning.

As he wrote a word on his card and waited for an envelope he glanced

about the embowered shop, and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses.

He had never seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse was

to send them to May instead of the lilies. But they did not look like

her--there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty.

In a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did,

he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and

slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of

the Countess Olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the

card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box.

"They'll go at once?" he enquired, pointing to the roses.

The florist assured him that they would.

X.

The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after

luncheon. As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York,

she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons;

but Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won

her over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a

hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.

The day was delectable. The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall

was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like

splintered crystals. It was the weather to call out May's radiance, and

she burned like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of the

glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared away

his underlying perplexities.

"It's so delicious--waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley

in one's room!" she said.

"Yesterday they came late. I hadn't time in the morning--"

"But your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much

more than if you'd given a standing order, and they came every morning

on the minute, like one's music-teacher--as I know Gertrude Lefferts's

did, for instance, when she and Lawrence were engaged."

"Ah--they would!" laughed Archer, amused at her keenness. He looked

sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to

add: "When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather

gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska. Was that

right?"

"How dear of you! Anything of that kind delights her. It's odd she

didn't mention it: she lunched with us today, and spoke of Mr.

Beaufort's having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der

Luyden a whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff. She seems so

surprised to receive flowers. Don't people send them in Europe? She

thinks it such a pretty custom."

"Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by Beaufort's," said Archer

irritably. Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the

roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them. He wanted to say: "I

called on your cousin yesterday," but hesitated. If Madame Olenska had

not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should. Yet not

to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked. To shake

off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and

Mrs. Welland's insistence on a long engagement.

"If you call it long! Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two

years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a year and a half. Why aren't we

very well off as we are?"

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of

himself for finding it singularly childish. No doubt she simply echoed

what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday,

and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.

"Never, if we won't let them, I suppose," he mused, and recalled his

mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: "Women ought to be as free as we

are--"

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young

woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many

generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended

bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of

the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of

the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they

had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open

hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

"We might be much better off. We might be altogether together--we might

travel."

Her face lit up. "That would be lovely," she owned: she would love to

travel. But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things

so differently.

"As if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer

insisted.

"Newland! You're so original!" she exulted.

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young

men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making

the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make--even to the

point of calling him original.

"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the

same folded paper. We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't you

and I strike out for ourselves, May?"

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and

her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.

"Mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed.

"If you would--"

"You _do_ love me, Newland! I'm so happy."

"But then--why not be happier?"

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"

"Why not--why not--why not?"

She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew very well that

they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason.

"I'm not clever enough to argue with you. But that kind of thing is

rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have hit on a

word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"

She was evidently staggered by this. "Of course I should hate it--so

would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top;

and feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the

discussion, she went on light-heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I

showed Ellen my ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever

saw. There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said. I do love

you, Newland, for being so artistic!"

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in

his study, Janey wandered in on him. He had failed to stop at his club

on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the

law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his

class. He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting

horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his

brain.

"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head

like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures

lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in

at the club at that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only

what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would

take in the discussion. The Duke of course would be their principal

theme; though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady

in a small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for

which Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless

be thoroughly gone into. Such "women" (as they were called) were few

in New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the

appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour

had profoundly agitated society. Only the day before, her carriage had

passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott's, and the latter had instantly rung the

little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home.

"What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?" people asked each

other with a shudder. Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very

hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.

He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then

quickly bent over his book (Swinburne's "Chastelard"--just out) as

if he had not seen her. She glanced at the writing-table heaped with

books, opened a volume of the "Contes Drolatiques," made a wry face

over the archaic French, and sighed: "What learned things you read!"

"Well--?" he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.

"Mother's very angry."

"Angry? With whom? About what?"

"Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here. She brought word that her

brother would come in after dinner: she couldn't say very much, because

he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself. He's with

cousin Louisa van der Luyden now."

"For heaven's sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. It would take an

omniscient Deity to know what you're talking about."

"It's not a time to be profane, Newland.... Mother feels badly enough

about your not going to church ..."

With a groan he plunged back into his book.

"_Newland_! Do listen. Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel

Struthers's party last night: she went there with the Duke and Mr.

Beaufort."

At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the

young man's breast. To smother it he laughed. "Well, what of it? I knew

she meant to."

Janey paled and her eyes began to project. "You knew she meant to--and

you didn't try to stop her? To warn her?"

"Stop her? Warn her?" He laughed again. "I'm not engaged to be married

to the Countess Olenska!" The words had a fantastic sound in his own

ears.

"You're marrying into her family."

"Oh, family--family!" he jeered.

"Newland--don't you care about Family?"

"Not a brass farthing."

"Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?"

"Not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."

"Mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips.

He felt like shouting back: "Yes, she is, and so are the van der

Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed

by the wing-tip of Reality." But he saw her long gentle face puckering

into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.

"Hang Countess Olenska! Don't be a goose, Janey--I'm not her keeper."

"No; but you _did_ ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner

so that we might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin

Louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."

"Well--what harm was there in inviting her? She was the best-looking

woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the

usual van der Luyden banquet."

"You know cousin Henry asked her to please you: he persuaded

cousin Louisa. And now they're so upset that they're going back to

Skuytercliff tomorrow. I think, Newland, you'd better come down. You

don't seem to understand how mother feels."

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother. She raised a troubled

brow from her needlework to ask: "Has Janey told you?"

"Yes." He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own. "But I can't

take it very seriously."

"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?"

"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess

Olenska's going to the house of a woman they consider common."

"Consider--!"

"Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday

evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition."

"Good music? All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table and

sang the things they sing at the places you go to in Paris. There was

smoking and champagne."

"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still

goes on."

"I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?"

"I've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday

when we've been in London."

"New York is neither Paris nor London."

"Oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned.

"You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You're

right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our

ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back

to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies."

Newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother ventured: "I was

going to put on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa

for a moment before dinner." He frowned, and she continued: "I thought

you might explain to her what you've just said: that society abroad

is different ... that people are not as particular, and that Madame

Olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things. It would

be, you know, dear," she added with an innocent adroitness, "in Madame

Olenska's interest if you did."

"Dearest mother, I really don't see how we're concerned in the matter.

The Duke took Madame Olenska to Mrs. Struthers's--in fact he brought

Mrs. Struthers to call on her. I was there when they came. If the van

der Luydens want to quarrel with anybody, the real culprit is under

their own roof."

"Quarrel? Newland, did you ever know of cousin Henry's quarrelling?

Besides, the Duke's his guest; and a stranger too. Strangers don't

discriminate: how should they? Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and

should have respected the feelings of New York."

"Well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw

Madame Olenska to them," cried her son, exasperated. "I don't see

myself--or you either--offering ourselves up to expiate her crimes."

"Oh, of course you see only the Mingott side," his mother answered, in

the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger.

The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portières and announced: "Mr.

Henry van der Luyden."

Mrs. Archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back with an

agitated hand.

"Another lamp," she cried to the retreating servant, while Janey bent

over to straighten her mother's cap.

Mr. van der Luyden's figure loomed on the threshold, and Newland Archer

went forward to greet his cousin.

"We were just talking about you, sir," he said.

Mr. van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement. He drew off

his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat

shyly, while Janey pushed an arm-chair forward, and Archer continued:

"And the Countess Olenska."

Mrs. Archer paled.

"Ah--a charming woman. I have just been to see her," said Mr. van der

Luyden, complacency restored to his brow. He sank into the chair, laid

his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way,

and went on: "She has a real gift for arranging flowers. I had sent

her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished. Instead

of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had

scattered them about loosely, here and there ... I can't say how. The

Duke had told me: he said: 'Go and see how cleverly she's arranged her

drawing-room.' And she has. I should really like to take Louisa to see

her, if the neighbourhood were not so--unpleasant."

A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from Mr. van der

Luyden. Mrs. Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which

she had nervously tumbled it, and Newland, leaning against the

chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand,

saw Janey's gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.

"The fact is," Mr. van der Luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg

with a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon's great signet-ring,

"the fact is, I dropped in to thank her for the very pretty note she

wrote me about my flowers; and also--but this is between ourselves, of

course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke to carry

her off to parties with him. I don't know if you've heard--"

Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile. "Has the Duke been carrying

her off to parties?"

"You know what these English grandees are. They're all alike. Louisa

and I are very fond of our cousin--but it's hopeless to expect people

who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about

our little republican distinctions. The Duke goes where he's amused."

Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke. "Yes--it seems he took her

with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's. Sillerton Jackson has

just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather troubled.

So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess Olenska

and explain--by the merest hint, you know--how we feel in New York

about certain things. I felt I might, without indelicacy, because the

evening she dined with us she rather suggested ... rather let me see

that she would be grateful for guidance. And she _was_."

Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been

self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions. On

his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer's countenance

dutifully reflected.

"How kind you both are, dear Henry--always! Newland will particularly

appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new

relations."

She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said: "Immensely, sir.

But I was sure you'd like Madame Olenska."

Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness. "I never ask

to my house, my dear Newland," he said, "any one whom I do not like.

And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson." With a glance at the clock

he rose and added: "But Louisa will be waiting. We are dining early, to

take the Duke to the Opera."

After the portières had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence

fell upon the Archer family.

"Gracious--how romantic!" at last broke explosively from Janey. No one

knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had

long since given up trying to interpret them.

Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh. "Provided it all turns out for

the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will

not. "Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes

this evening: I really shan't know what to say to him."

"Poor mother! But he won't come--" her son laughed, stooping to kiss

away her frown.

XI.

Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in

his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low,

attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.

Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations

of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident

perplexity. As he stroked his close-clipped white whiskers and ran

his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his

disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family

Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.

"My dear sir--" he always addressed Archer as "sir"--"I have sent

for you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment,

I prefer not to mention either to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood." The

gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for,

as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New

York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since

dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking,

his own grandson.

He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow. "For family

reasons--" he continued.

Archer looked up.

"The Mingott family," said Mr. Letterblair with an explanatory smile

and bow. "Mrs. Manson Mingott sent for me yesterday. Her grand-daughter

the Countess Olenska wishes to sue her husband for divorce. Certain

papers have been placed in my hands." He paused and drummed on his

desk. "In view of your prospective alliance with the family I should

like to consult you--to consider the case with you--before taking any

farther steps."

Archer felt the blood in his temples. He had seen the Countess Olenska

only once since his visit to her, and then at the Opera, in the Mingott

box. During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate

image, receding from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful

place in it. He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's first

random allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip.

Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful to him

as to his mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no doubt

prompted by old Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently planning to

draw him into the affair. After all, there were plenty of Mingott men

for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a Mingott by marriage.

He waited for the senior partner to continue. Mr. Letterblair unlocked

a drawer and drew out a packet. "If you will run your eye over these

papers--"

Archer frowned. "I beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the

prospective relationship, I should prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth

or Mr. Redwood."

Mr. Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended. It was unusual

for a junior to reject such an opening.

He bowed. "I respect your scruple, sir; but in this case I believe

true delicacy requires you to do as I ask. Indeed, the suggestion is

not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott's and her son's. I have seen Lovell

Mingott; and also Mr. Welland. They all named you."

Archer felt his temper rising. He had been somewhat languidly drifting

with events for the last fortnight, and letting May's fair looks and

radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the

Mingott claims. But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott's roused him to

a sense of what the clan thought they had the right to exact from a

prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role.

"Her uncles ought to deal with this," he said.

"They have. The matter has been gone into by the family. They are

opposed to the Countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal

opinion."

The young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand.

"Does she want to marry again?"

"I believe it is suggested; but she denies it."

"Then--"

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?

Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my

opinion."

Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents. Since their

last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in

ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska. His hour alone with

her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which

the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the

Countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.

Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement

in the van der Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a

touch of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful

elderly gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did

not need either the private consolations or the public championship

of a young man of his small compass. To look at the matter in this

light simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the

dim domestic virtues. He could not picture May Welland, in whatever

conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and

lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed

to him finer or fairer than in the week that followed. He had even

yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one

disarming answer to his plea for haste.

"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you

have your way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she

had answered, with her clearest look: "Yes; and that's what makes it so

hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a little

girl."

That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would

like always to be sure of his wife's making. If one had habitually

breathed the New York air there were times when anything less

crystalline seemed stifling.

The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but

they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.

They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's

solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied

for the settlement of her financial situation. There was also a short

letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer

rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered Mr.

Letterblair's office.

"Here are the letters, sir. If you wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he

said in a constrained voice.

"Thank you--thank you, Mr. Archer. Come and dine with me tonight if

you're free, and we'll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish

to call on our client tomorrow."

Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon. It was a

winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon

above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the

pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr.

Letterblair were closeted together after dinner. It was impossible to

decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska himself

rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes. A great wave of

compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood

before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs

from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.

He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be

spared whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the

thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New

York air so pure. "Are we only Pharisees after all?" he wondered,

puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human

vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty.

For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles

had always been. He passed for a young man who had not been afraid

of risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly

Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a

becoming air of adventure. But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman";

foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the

secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as

he possessed. When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart,

but now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case. The affair, in

short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had

been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed

belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and

respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied. In this view they were

sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female

relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things

happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always

criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded

any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and

designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The

only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a

nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.

In the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess,

love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified. Rich and

idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations;

and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive

and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer

defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by

conventional standards.

On reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at

what hour of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by

a messenger-boy, who returned presently with a word to the effect that

she was going to Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with

the van der Luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening

after dinner. The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet,

without date or address, but her hand was firm and free. He was amused

at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of Skuytercliff,

but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would

most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the "unpleasant."

He was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext

for excusing himself soon after dinner. He had formed his own opinion

from the papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go

into the matter with his senior partner. Mr. Letterblair was a widower,

and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby room hung

with yellowing prints of "The Death of Chatham" and "The Coronation of

Napoleon." On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton knife-cases, stood

a decanter of Haut Brion, and another of the old Lanning port (the gift

of a client), which the wastrel Tom Lanning had sold off a year or two

before his mysterious and discreditable death in San Francisco--an

incident less publicly humiliating to the family than the sale of the

cellar.

After a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young

broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with

currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise. Mr. Letterblair, who lunched

on a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and deeply, and insisted

on his guest's doing the same. Finally, when the closing rites had

been accomplished, the cloth was removed, cigars were lit, and Mr.

Letterblair, leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward,

said, spreading his back agreeably to the coal fire behind him: "The

whole family are against a divorce. And I think rightly."

Archer instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument. "But

why, sir? If there ever was a case--"

"Well--what's the use? _she's_ here--he's there; the Atlantic's between

them. She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's

voluntarily returned to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements

take precious good care of that. As things go over there, Olenski's

acted generously: he might have turned her out without a penny."

The young man knew this and was silent.

"I understand, though," Mr. Letterblair continued, "that she attaches

no importance to the money. Therefore, as the family say, why not let

well enough alone?"

Archer had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with Mr.

Letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and

supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of

a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.

"I think that's for her to decide."

"H'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?"

"You mean the threat in her husband's letter? What weight would that

carry? It's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."

"Yes; but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the

suit."

"Unpleasant--!" said Archer explosively.

Mr. Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the

young man, aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in

his mind, bowed acquiescently while his senior continued: "Divorce is

always unpleasant."

"You agree with me?" Mr. Letterblair resumed, after a waiting silence.

"Naturally," said Archer.

"Well, then, I may count on you; the Mingotts may count on you; to use

your influence against the idea?"

Archer hesitated. "I can't pledge myself till I've seen the Countess

Olenska," he said at length.

"Mr. Archer, I don't understand you. Do you want to marry into a family

with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?"

"I don't think that has anything to do with the case."

Mr. Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young

partner a cautious and apprehensive gaze.

Archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn,

and for some obscure reason he disliked the prospect. Now that the

job had been thrust on him he did not propose to relinquish it; and,

to guard against the possibility, he saw that he must reassure the

unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the Mingotts.

"You may be sure, sir, that I shan't commit myself till I've reported

to you; what I meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've

heard what Madame Olenska has to say."

Mr. Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of

the best New York tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch,

pleaded an engagement and took leave.

XII.

Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner

calls, though derided in Archer's set, still generally prevailed. As

the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place, the long

thoroughfare was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before

the Reggie Chiverses' (where there was a dinner for the Duke), and the

occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler

ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall.

Thus, as Archer crossed Washington Square, he remarked that old Mr.

du Lac was calling on his cousins the Dagonets, and turning down the

corner of West Tenth Street he saw Mr. Skipworth, of his own firm,

obviously bound on a visit to the Miss Lannings. A little farther up

Fifth Avenue, Beaufort appeared on his doorstep, darkly projected

against a blaze of light, descended to his private brougham, and rolled

away to a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination. It was

not an Opera night, and no one was giving a party, so that Beaufort's

outing was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature. Archer connected it

in his mind with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in which

beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared, and

before whose newly painted door the canary-coloured brougham of Miss

Fanny Ring was frequently seen to wait.

Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's

world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians

and "people who wrote." These scattered fragments of humanity had

never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure.

In spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite

respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves. Medora Manson,

in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had

soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of

Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters

who imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William

Winter, and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the

magazine editors and musical and literary critics.

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these

persons. They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one didn't

know about in the background of their lives and minds. Literature and

art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs. Archer was always

at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable and cultivated

society had been when it included such figures as Washington Irving,

Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit Fay." The most

celebrated authors of that generation had been "gentlemen"; perhaps

the unknown persons who succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but

their origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with the

stage and the Opera, made any old New York criterion inapplicable to

them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody

between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had

carriages. It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't

tell, and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and

almost parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have

bridged the abyss; but she had never opened a book or looked at a

picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala

nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.

Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded

in bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged

footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover, he was as

illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as

the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough

to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could

remember, and had accepted them as part of the structure of his

universe. He knew that there were societies where painters and poets

and novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were as sought

after as Dukes; he had often pictured to himself what it would have

been to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of

Mérimée (whose "Lettres à une Inconnue" was one of his inseparables),

of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris. But such things were

inconceivable in New York, and unsettling to think of. Archer knew most

of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he met them

at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that were

beginning to come into existence. He enjoyed them there, and was bored

with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid and

dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and even

after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with

the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that the

only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where they

would naturally merge.

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the

Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted

mysterious joys. He remembered with what amusement she had told him

that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in

a "Bohemian" quarter given over to "people who wrote." It was not the

peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped

her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising.

She herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her

drawing-room (a part of the house in which books were usually supposed

to be "out of place"), though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted

Archer's interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,

Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers. Ruminating on these things as he

approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in

which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into

conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be

of use in her present difficulty.

Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously. On the bench in the

hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk with

a gold J. B. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no

mistaking the fact that these costly articles were the property of

Julius Beaufort.

Archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his

card and going away; then he remembered that in writing to Madame

Olenska he had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that he

wished to see her privately. He had therefore no one but himself to

blame if she had opened her doors to other visitors; and he entered

the drawing-room with the dogged determination to make Beaufort feel

himself in the way, and to outstay him.

The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped

with an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing

church candles of yellowish wax. He had thrust his chest out,

supporting his shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight

on one large patent-leather foot. As Archer entered he was smiling

and looking down on his hostess, who sat on a sofa placed at right

angles to the chimney. A table banked with flowers formed a screen

behind it, and against the orchids and azaleas which the young man

recognised as tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses, Madame Olenska sat

half-reclined, her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving

the arm bare to the elbow.

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were

called "simple dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-boned

silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the

crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to

show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band. But Madame Olenska,

heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet

bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur.

Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the

new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the

Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with

her chin nestling in fur. There was something perverse and provocative

in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and

in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect

was undeniably pleasing.

"Lord love us--three whole days at Skuytercliff!" Beaufort was saying

in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered. "You'd better take all

your furs, and a hot-water-bottle."

"Why? Is the house so cold?" she asked, holding out her left hand to

Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss

it.

"No; but the missus is," said Beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young

man.

"But I thought her so kind. She came herself to invite me. Granny says

I must certainly go."

"Granny would, of course. And I say it's a shame you're going to miss

the little oyster supper I'd planned for you at Delmonico's next

Sunday, with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people."

She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.

"Ah--that does tempt me! Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers's

I've not met a single artist since I've been here."

"What kind of artists? I know one or two painters, very good fellows,

that I could bring to see you if you'd allow me," said Archer boldly.

"Painters? Are there painters in New York?" asked Beaufort, in a tone

implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures;

and Madame Olenska said to Archer, with her grave smile: "That would

be charming. But I was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers,

actors, musicians. My husband's house was always full of them."

She said the words "my husband" as if no sinister associations were

connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the

lost delights of her married life. Archer looked at her perplexedly,

wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to

touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her

reputation in order to break with it.

"I do think," she went on, addressing both men, "that the _imprévu_ adds

to one's enjoyment. It's perhaps a mistake to see the same people every

day."

"It's confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness,"

Beaufort grumbled. "And when I try to liven it up for you, you go

back on me. Come--think better of it! Sunday is your last chance, for

Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I've a

private room, and a Steinway, and they'll sing all night for me."

"How delicious! May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow morning?"

She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice.

Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood

staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes.

"Why not now?"

"It's too serious a question to decide at this late hour."

"Do you call it late?"

She returned his glance coolly. "Yes; because I have still to talk

business with Mr. Archer for a little while."

"Ah," Beaufort snapped. There was no appeal from her tone, and with a

slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed

with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold: "I say,

Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop in town of course

you're included in the supper," left the room with his heavy important

step.

For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of

his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his

mind.

"You know painters, then? You live in their milieu?" she asked, her

eyes full of interest.

"Oh, not exactly. I don't know that the arts have a milieu here, any of

them; they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt."

"But you care for such things?"

"Immensely. When I'm in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition. I

try to keep up."

She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from

her long draperies.

"I used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things. But now

I want to try not to."

"You want to try not to?"

"Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody

else here."

Archer reddened. "You'll never be like everybody else," he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little. "Ah, don't say that. If you

knew how I hate to be different!"

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask. She leaned forward,

clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into

remote dark distances.

"I want to get away from it all," she insisted.

He waited a moment and cleared his throat. "I know. Mr. Letterblair has

told me."

"Ah?"

"That's the reason I've come. He asked me to--you see I'm in the firm."

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened. "You mean

you can manage it for me? I can talk to you instead of Mr. Letterblair?

Oh, that will be so much easier!"

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his

self-satisfaction. He perceived that she had spoken of business to

Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed Beaufort was

something of a triumph.

"I am here to talk about it," he repeated.

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the

back of the sofa. Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed

by the rich red of her dress. She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a

pathetic and even pitiful figure.

"Now we're coming to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself

of the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in

his mother and her contemporaries. How little practice he had had in

dealing with unusual situations! Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar

to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage. In face of what

was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: "I

want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past."

"I understand that."

Her face warmed. "Then you'll help me?"

"First--" he hesitated--"perhaps I ought to know a little more."

She seemed surprised. "You know about my husband--my life with him?"

He made a sign of assent.

"Well--then--what more is there? In this country are such things

tolerated? I'm a Protestant--our church does not forbid divorce in such

cases."

"Certainly not."

They were both silent again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count

Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them. The letter filled

only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in

speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry

blackguard. But how much truth was behind it? Only Count Olenski's wife

could tell.

"I've looked through the papers you gave to Mr. Letterblair," he said

at length.

"Well--can there be anything more abominable?"

"No."

She changed her position slightly, screening her eyes with her lifted

hand.

"Of course you know," Archer continued, "that if your husband chooses

to fight the case--as he threatens to--"

"Yes--?"

"He can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable to

you: say them publicly, so that they would get about, and harm you even

if--"

"If--?"

"I mean: no matter how unfounded they were."

She paused for a long interval; so long that, not wishing to keep his

eyes on her shaded face, he had time to imprint on his mind the exact

shape of her other hand, the one on her knee, and every detail of the

three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which, he noticed, a

wedding ring did not appear.

"What harm could such accusations, even if he made them publicly, do me

here?"

It was on his lips to exclaim: "My poor child--far more harm than

anywhere else!" Instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his

ears like Mr. Letterblair's: "New York society is a very small world

compared with the one you've lived in. And it's ruled, in spite of

appearances, by a few people with--well, rather old-fashioned ideas."

She said nothing, and he continued: "Our ideas about marriage and

divorce are particularly old-fashioned. Our legislation favours

divorce--our social customs don't."

"Never?"

"Well--not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has

appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any

unconventional action to--to offensive insinuations--"

She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely

hoping for a flash of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial.

None came.

A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow, and a log

broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks. The whole hushed and

brooding room seemed to be waiting silently with Archer.

"Yes," she murmured at length, "that's what my family tell me."

He winced a little. "It's not unnatural--"

"_Our_ family," she corrected herself; and Archer coloured. "For you'll

be my cousin soon," she continued gently.

"I hope so."

"And you take their view?"

He stood up at this, wandered across the room, stared with void eyes

at one of the pictures against the old red damask, and came back

irresolutely to her side. How could he say: "Yes, if what your husband

hints is true, or if you've no way of disproving it?"

"Sincerely--" she interjected, as he was about to speak.

He looked down into the fire. "Sincerely, then--what should you gain

that would compensate for the possibility--the certainty--of a lot of

beastly talk?"

"But my freedom--is that nothing?"

It flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was

true, and that she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt. How was

he to tell her that, if she really cherished such a plan, the laws of

the State were inexorably opposed to it? The mere suspicion that the

thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and impatiently toward

her. "But aren't you as free as air as it is?" he returned. "Who can

touch you? Mr. Letterblair tells me the financial question has been

settled--"

"Oh, yes," she said indifferently.

"Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely

disagreeable and painful? Think of the newspapers--their vileness! It's

all stupid and narrow and unjust--but one can't make over society."

"No," she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and desolate that he

felt a sudden remorse for his own hard thoughts.

"The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is

supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention

that keeps the family together--protects the children, if there are

any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his

lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her

silence seemed to have laid bare. Since she would not or could not say

the one word that would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let

her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret. Better keep on

the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a

wound he could not heal.

"It's my business, you know," he went on, "to help you to see these

things as the people who are fondest of you see them. The Mingotts, the

Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations: if I

didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be

fair of me, would it?" He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her

in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence.

She said slowly: "No; it wouldn't be fair."

The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a

gurgling appeal for attention. Madame Olenska rose, wound it up and

returned to the fire, but without resuming her seat.

Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more

for either of them to say, and Archer stood up also.

"Very well; I will do what you wish," she said abruptly. The blood

rushed to his forehead; and, taken aback by the suddenness of her

surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.

"I--I do want to help you," he said.

"You do help me. Good night, my cousin."

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless.

She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat

under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter

night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

XIII.

It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.

The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role

and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the

admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always

packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved;

in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed

sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as

the galleries did.

There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor

to ceiling. It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost

monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and

turned to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece

and looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without

fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and

flowing in long lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow

black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.

When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the

mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands. On the threshold he

paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of

velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or

changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the curtain fell.

It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer

went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada

Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do

in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence,

its dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic

outpourings.

On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy

by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from

Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.

It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between

the two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned.

Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young

English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall

red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly

face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance. Nor were

Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;

they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the

lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case. Wherein,

then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a

kind of retrospective excitement? It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's

mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities

outside the daily run of experience. She had hardly ever said a word

to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a

projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something

inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself. Archer had

always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a

small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency

to have things happen to them. This tendency he had felt from the first

in Madame Olenska. The quiet, almost passive young woman struck him

as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen, no

matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to avoid

them. The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so thick

with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently passed

unperceived. It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her that

gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom:

the things she took for granted gave the measure of those she had

rebelled against.

Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation

was not unfounded. The mysterious person who figured in his wife's past

as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share in

her escape. The conditions from which she had fled were intolerable,

past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was frightened,

she was desperate--what more natural than that she should be grateful

to her rescuer? The pity was that her gratitude put her, in the law's

eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable husband. Archer had

made her understand this, as he was bound to do; he had also made her

understand that simple-hearted kindly New York, on whose larger charity

she had apparently counted, was precisely the place where she could

least hope for indulgence.

To have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned

acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful to him. He felt himself

drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her

dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing

her. He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather than

to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze of her

family. He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both that

she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her decision on

the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the proceeding;

and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes from the

"unpleasantness" she had spared them.

"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of

her future son-in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for

a confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and

added impatiently: "Silly goose! I told her myself what nonsense it

was. Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid, when

she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"

These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame

Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the

parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up

to leave the theatre.

In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw

the lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts,

Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men. He had not spoken with

her alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being

with her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort

recognised him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of

invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.

Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs.

Beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk,

Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska. There was no one else in

the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in

a confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday

reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing).

Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort

listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle

to be seen in profile from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke

in a low voice.

"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her

a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"

Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise. He had called

only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of

yellow roses, and each time without a card. She had never before made

any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of

him as the sender. Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her

associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him

with an agitated pleasure.

"I was thinking of that too--I was going to leave the theatre in order

to take the picture away with me," he said.

To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily. She looked

down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands,

and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"

"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.

In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the

previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed

susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent

the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man,

with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might

interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should

always go with him on his annual journey to the south. To preserve an

unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not

have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for

his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.

As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland

was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife

and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were

both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always

joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.

It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's

accompanying her father. The reputation of the Mingotts' family

physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr.

Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was

therefore inflexible. Originally, it had been intended that May's

engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and

the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected

to alter Mr. Welland's plans. Archer would have liked to join the

travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his

betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little

arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted

of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for

a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the

resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal

constituents of married life.

He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered

lids. "I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said

abruptly.

"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject

at such a moment.

"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly;

"but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..."

"I know."

"And I wanted to tell you that I _do_ feel you were right; and that I'm

grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her

eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke

in on them.

Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.

Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in

which, with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to

Ellen" in their absence. "She likes you and admires you so much--and

you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and

unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott

either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society

than she is. And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her,

though the family won't admit it. I think she's been used to lots

of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and

celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.

Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and

clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York

who can talk to her about what she really cares for."

His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not

meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not

care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame

Olenska's champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take care of

herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined. She had

Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a

protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among

them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. Yet he never

saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,

May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen

Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.

XIV.

As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,

the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he

cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of

club and chop-house banter.

He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby

round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the

Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a

little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not in the

mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined on

the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh, well so

have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."

They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here,

what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box

of yours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts

seems so smitten by."

Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the

devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all,

why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to manifest

such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist.

"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.

"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The

fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to

settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down

her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed

in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully

bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too

dazzled to ask her name."

A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary

in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child.

But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded,

carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett

into forgetting to ask who she was.

"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."

"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know

Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."

"They would be, if you'd let them."

"Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate

unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and

both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.

"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our

slum?"

"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of

our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his

own picture of her.

"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well,

here's my corner."

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and

musing on his last words.

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most

interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had

allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are

still struggling.

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never

seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of

journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett

had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that

his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or

might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening

clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social

observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it

cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to

consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items

in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring

"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed

their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping

on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less

self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated

by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean

bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner

and carry him off for a long talk.

Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters,

untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after

publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,

of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away,

and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per

contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned

his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly,

where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England

love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was

inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile

bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His

conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and

feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained

still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and

curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views

usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once

said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only one

ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in

my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't _you_ get into

touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."

Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash

the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the

others--Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in

America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could

hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at

the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"

Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.

It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy

fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal

or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of thing

was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the

emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

"Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local

patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and

cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition

that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little

minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're

like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a

Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll

up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ...

God! If I could emigrate ..."

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation

back to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.

Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no

more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the

muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't

make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of

literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake made it

seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a smaller

box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth

Avenue.

The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow

roses. In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office,

perceived that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one,

and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility

of his life. Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of

St. Augustine with May Welland? No one was deceived by his pretense

of professional activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of

which Mr. Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in

the management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there

were always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without

professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day,

sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading

the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have

an occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as

derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more

gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had much

hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire to

do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was

already perceptibly spreading.

It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.

He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations

in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and

generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to

Madame Olenska. But once he was married, what would become of this

narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He

had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though

perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and

luxurious routine of their elders.

From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking

if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a

reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive

any letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified him

beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster

of yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. It

was only on the third morning that he received a line by post from

the Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,

whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the

Duke on board his steamer.

"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual

preliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind

friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.

You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe

here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional

"Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.

The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska

running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? His first

thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he

did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque

exaggeration. Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not

wholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were

translating from the French. "Je me suis évadée--" put in that way,

the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have

wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very

likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of

the pleasure of the moment.

It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off

to Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite

period. The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened

to visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the

few thus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris,

the delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he

remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the

young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. The van der Luydens

had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there

were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that

beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on

rescuing her.

He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and

almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused

an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses

at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.

He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank,

with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a

general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He had

just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had

preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils. But

he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and

told the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs. Reggie

didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that

there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.

XV.

Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on

Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a

week-end at Highbank.

In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few

of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with

Reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long

and impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a

corner of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself

broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to

tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight,

he assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a

burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours

by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the

basement. But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove

over to Skuytercliff.

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an

Italian villa. Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did

some who had. The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his

youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his

approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet. It was a large square

wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and

white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows.

From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered

by balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a

small irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping

conifers. To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with

"specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long

ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below,

in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon

had built on the land granted him in 1612.

Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the

Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its

distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than

thirty feet from its awful front. Now, as Archer rang the bell, the

long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise of the

butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he

had been summoned from his final sleep.

Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his

arrival was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out,

having driven to afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly

three quarters of an hour earlier.

"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my

impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading

yesterday's Evening Post. I heard him say, sir, on his return from

church this morning, that he intended to look through the Evening Post

after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to the library door and

listen--"

But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies;

and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.

A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the

park to the high-road. The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and

a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van der Luyden never walked, and

that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage. Presently, however,

coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught sight of a

slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead. He hurried

forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of welcome.

"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff.

The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of

old days; and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered: "I came to

see what you were running away from."

Her face clouded over, but she answered: "Ah, well--you will see,

presently."

The answer puzzled him. "Why--do you mean that you've been overtaken?"

She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and

rejoined in a lighter tone: "Shall we walk on? I'm so cold after the

sermon. And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"

The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak.

"Ellen--what is it? You must tell me."

"Oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the

ground," she cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across

the snow, the dog leaping about her with challenging barks. For a

moment Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the

red meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met,

panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.

She looked up at him and smiled. "I knew you'd come!"

"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy

in their nonsense. The white glitter of the trees filled the air with

its own mysterious brightness, and as they walked on over the snow the

ground seemed to sing under their feet.

"Where did you come from?" Madame Olenska asked.

He told her, and added: "It was because I got your note."

After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice:

"May asked you to take care of me."

"I didn't need any asking."

"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless? What a poor thing

you must all think me! But women here seem not--seem never to feel the

need: any more than the blessed in heaven."

He lowered his voice to ask: "What sort of a need?"

"Ah, don't ask me! I don't speak your language," she retorted

petulantly.

The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path,

looking down at her.

"What did I come for, if I don't speak yours?"

"Oh, my friend--!" She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he pleaded

earnestly: "Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"

She shrugged again. "Does anything ever happen in heaven?"

He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a

word. Finally she said: "I will tell you--but where, where, where? One

can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all

the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for

the fire, or the newspaper! Is there nowhere in an American house where

one may be by one's self? You're so shy, and yet you're so public. I

always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the stage, before

a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."

"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.

They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat

walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central

chimney. The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed

windows Archer caught the light of a fire.

"Why--the house is open!" he said.

She stood still. "No; only for today, at least. I wanted to see it, and

Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that we

might stop there on the way back from church this morning." She ran up

the steps and tried the door. "It's still unlocked--what luck! Come in

and we can have a quiet talk. Mrs. van der Luyden has driven over to

see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the house for

another hour."

He followed her into the narrow passage. His spirits, which had dropped

at her last words, rose with an irrational leap. The homely little

house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the firelight, as

if magically created to receive them. A big bed of embers still gleamed

in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung from an ancient crane.

Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other across the tiled hearth, and

rows of Delft plates stood on shelves against the walls. Archer stooped

over and threw a log upon the embers.

Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.

Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.

"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.

"Yes." She paused. "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."

"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the

effort to say just so much and no more.

"No; I know. But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."

The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses

to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black

tree-boles against the snow. But it was as if she too had shifted her

place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping

over the fire with her indolent smile. Archer's heart was beating

insubordinately. What if it were from him that she had been running

away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone

together in this secret room?

"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to

come--tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away

from," he insisted.

He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at

her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the

whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the

outer snow.

For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined

her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light

arms about his neck. While he waited, soul and body throbbing with

the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a

heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing

along the path to the house. The man was Julius Beaufort.

"Ah--!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.

Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand

into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she

shrank back.

"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.

"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured. Her hand still

clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the

passage threw open the door of the house.

"Hallo, Beaufort--this way! Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.

During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived

with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.

Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska,

had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly. His way of

ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave

them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of

nonexistence. Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was

aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his

vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.

Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance;

but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes. It was

fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming,

though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate,

she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New

York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him. The ostensible

reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night before, of

a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was really just the

thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she didn't take it;

and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she had led him in

running away just as he had found it.

"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little

bit nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town, and

been toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of

tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real

irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska

twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might

one day actually converse with each other from street to street, or

even--incredible dream!--from one town to another. This struck from

all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes

as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are

talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it

would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the

telephone carried them safely back to the big house.

Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and

walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess

Olenska indoors. It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens

encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine,

and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more

than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to

his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to

spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with

whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.

Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the

long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.

He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had

only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women. His dull and

childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more

permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in

his own set. This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly

flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities

displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist

them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her

departure no more than a manœuvre.

Archer did not really believe this. Little as he had actually seen of

Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face,

and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and

even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance. But, after all, if this

were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the

express purpose of meeting him? If she had done that, she ceased to

be an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of

dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed"

herself irretrievably.

No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably

despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an

advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents

and two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors

and people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt

for local prejudices. Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was

purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native

shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and

socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the

Central Park. How should any one coming from a wider world not feel the

difference and be attracted by it?

Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he

and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that

in some respects this was true. But Beaufort understood every turn of

her dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his

attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count

Olenski's letter. This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count

Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young

woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that

reminded her of her past. She might believe herself wholly in revolt

against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even

though it were against her will.

Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case

for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim. A longing to enlighten her was

strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she

asked was to be enlightened.

That evening he unpacked his books from London. The box was full of

things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert

Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant

tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately

been interesting things said in the reviews. He had declined three

dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the

pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what

he was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.

Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had

ordered because the name had attracted him: "The House of Life." He

took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he

had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably

tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary

of human passions. All through the night he pursued through those

enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen

Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the

brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr.

Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in

the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability

as the visions of the night.

"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the

coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added: "Newland, dear, I've

noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting

yourself be overworked?" For it was the conviction of both ladies that,

under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's life

was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had never

thought it necessary to undeceive them.

The next two or three days dragged by heavily. The taste of the usual

was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as

if he were being buried alive under his future. He heard nothing of

the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he

met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the

whist-tables. It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note

awaiting him on his return home. "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to

you. Ellen." These were the only words it contained.

The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket,

smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you." After dinner he

went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight,

that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a

number of times. There were several ways of answering it, and he gave

considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated

night. That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to

pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was

leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.

XVI.

When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine to the

house which had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's, and saw May

Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair, he wondered

why he had waited so long to come.

Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged

to him; and he, who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary

restraints, had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what

people might think of his stealing a holiday!

Her first exclamation was: "Newland--has anything happened?" and it

occurred to him that it would have been more "feminine" if she had

instantly read in his eyes why he had come. But when he answered:

"Yes--I found I had to see you," her happy blushes took the chill from

her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven, and how soon

even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a

tolerant family.

Early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal

greetings, and Archer longed to be alone with May, and to pour out

all his tenderness and his impatience. It still lacked an hour to the

late Welland breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in she

proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the

town. She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that netted

the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its meshes.

Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered like silver

wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their youthful

limpidity. As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging gait her

face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.

To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of

the blue sky and the lazy river. They sat down on a bench under the

orange-trees and he put his arm about her and kissed her. It was like

drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it; but his pressure may have

been more vehement than he had intended, for the blood rose to her face

and she drew back as if he had startled her.

"What is it?" he asked, smiling; and she looked at him with surprise,

and answered: "Nothing."

A slight embarrassment fell on them, and her hand slipped out of his.

It was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except for

their fugitive embrace in the Beaufort conservatory, and he saw that

she was disturbed, and shaken out of her cool boyish composure.

"Tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his

tilted-back head, and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle.

To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of

carrying on his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening

to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an

occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in. A few

pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the

inn, and the Selfridge Merrys had come down for three weeks because

Kate Merry had had bronchitis. They were planning to lay out a lawn

tennis court on the sands; but no one but Kate and May had racquets,

and most of the people had not even heard of the game.

All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than

look at the little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before

(the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart

"How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," because it was one

of the first things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be

able to tell him that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called

Robert Browning.

Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for

breakfast; and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its

pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where

the Wellands were installed for the winter. Mr. Welland's sensitive

domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern

hotel, and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable

difficulties, Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise

an establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and

partly drawn from the local African supply.

"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home;

otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him

any good," she explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising

Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming across a

breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies,

was presently saying to Archer: "You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we

literally camp. I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how to

rough it."

Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by

the young man's sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain

that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed

to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.

"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said, heaping

his plate with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowning them in golden

syrup. "If I'd only been as prudent at your age May would have been

dancing at the Assemblies now, instead of spending her winters in a

wilderness with an old invalid."

"Oh, but I love it here, Papa; you know I do. If only Newland could

stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York."

"Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold," said Mrs.

Welland indulgently; and the young man laughed, and said he supposed

there was such a thing as one's profession.

He managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm,

to make his cold last a week; and it shed an ironic light on the

situation to know that Mr. Letterblair's indulgence was partly due to

the satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had

settled the troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce. Mr. Letterblair

had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had "rendered an invaluable

service" to the whole family, and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been

particularly pleased; and one day when May had gone for a drive with

her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took

occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's

presence.

"I'm afraid Ellen's ideas are not at all like ours. She was barely

eighteen when Medora Manson took her back to Europe--you remember the

excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball? Another

of Medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic! That must

have been at least twelve years ago; and since then Ellen has never

been to America. No wonder she is completely Europeanised."

"But European society is not given to divorce: Countess Olenska thought

she would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom."

It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since

he had left Skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek.

Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately. "That is just like the

extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us. They think we

dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce! That is why it seems to me

so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York. They accept

our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid

stories."

Archer made no comment on this, and Mrs. Welland continued: "But we do

most thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen to give up the idea.

Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing with her; both of

them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your

influence--in fact she said so to her grandmother. She has an unbounded

admiration for you. Poor Ellen--she was always a wayward child. I

wonder what her fate will be?"

"What we've all contrived to make it," he felt like answering. "If

you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some

decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it."

He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the

words instead of merely thinking them. He could picture the sudden

decomposure of her firm placid features, to which a lifelong mastery

over trifles had given an air of factitious authority. Traces still

lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's; and he asked

himself if May's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged

image of invincible innocence.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the

innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against

experience!

"I verily believe," Mrs. Welland continued, "that if the horrible

business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband's

death-blow. I don't know any of the details; I only ask not to, as

I told poor Ellen when she tried to talk to me about it. Having an

invalid to care for, I have to keep my mind bright and happy. But Mr.

Welland was terribly upset; he had a slight temperature every morning

while we were waiting to hear what had been decided. It was the horror

of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of course,

dear Newland, you felt that too. We all knew that you were thinking of

May."

"I'm always thinking of May," the young man rejoined, rising to cut

short the conversation.

He had meant to seize the opportunity of his private talk with Mrs.

Welland to urge her to advance the date of his marriage. But he could

think of no arguments that would move her, and with a sense of relief

he saw Mr. Welland and May driving up to the door.

His only hope was to plead again with May, and on the day before his

departure he walked with her to the ruinous garden of the Spanish

Mission. The background lent itself to allusions to European scenes;

and May, who was looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat

that cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes, kindled into

eagerness as he spoke of Granada and the Alhambra.

"We might be seeing it all this spring--even the Easter ceremonies at

Seville," he urged, exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger

concession.

"Easter in Seville? And it will be Lent next week!" she laughed.

"Why shouldn't we be married in Lent?" he rejoined; but she looked so

shocked that he saw his mistake.

"Of course I didn't mean that, dearest; but soon after Easter--so that

we could sail at the end of April. I know I could arrange it at the

office."

She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to

dream of it sufficed her. It was like hearing him read aloud out of his

poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in

real life.

"Oh, do go on, Newland; I do love your descriptions."

"But why should they be only descriptions? Why shouldn't we make them

real?"

"We shall, dearest, of course; next year." Her voice lingered over it.

"Don't you want them to be real sooner? Can't I persuade you to break

away now?"

She bowed her head, vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim.

"Why should we dream away another year? Look at me, dear! Don't you

understand how I want you for my wife?"

For a moment she remained motionless; then she raised on him eyes of

such despairing clearness that he half-released her waist from his hold.

But suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably. "I'm not sure

if I _do_ understand," she said. "Is it--is it because you're not certain

of continuing to care for me?"

Archer sprang up from his seat. "My God--perhaps--I don't know," he

broke out angrily.

May Welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow

in womanly stature and dignity. Both were silent for a moment, as if

dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words: then she said in a low

voice: "If that is it--is there some one else?"

"Some one else--between you and me?" He echoed her words slowly, as

though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted time to repeat

the question to himself. She seemed to catch the uncertainty of his

voice, for she went on in a deepening tone: "Let us talk frankly,

Newland. Sometimes I've felt a difference in you; especially since our

engagement has been announced."

"Dear--what madness!" he recovered himself to exclaim.

She met his protest with a faint smile. "If it is, it won't hurt us to

talk about it." She paused, and added, lifting her head with one of her

noble movements: "Or even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of it?

You might so easily have made a mistake."

He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny

path at their feet. "Mistakes are always easy to make; but if I had

made one of the kind you suggest, is it likely that I should be

imploring you to hasten our marriage?"

She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her

sunshade while she struggled for expression. "Yes," she said at length.

"You might want--once for all--to settle the question: it's one way."

Her quiet lucidity startled him, but did not mislead him into thinking

her insensible. Under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile,

and a slight tremor of the nostril above her resolutely steadied lips.

"Well--?" he questioned, sitting down on the bench, and looking up at

her with a frown that he tried to make playful.

She dropped back into her seat and went on: "You mustn't think that

a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and one

notices--one has one's feelings and ideas. And of course, long before

you told me that you cared for me, I'd known that there was some one

else you were interested in; every one was talking about it two years

ago at Newport. And once I saw you sitting together on the verandah at

a dance--and when she came back into the house her face was sad, and I

felt sorry for her; I remembered it afterward, when we were engaged."

Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and she sat clasping and

unclasping her hands about the handle of her sunshade. The young man

laid his upon them with a gentle pressure; his heart dilated with an

inexpressible relief.

"My dear child--was _that_ it? If you only knew the truth!"

She raised her head quickly. "Then there is a truth I don't know?"

He kept his hand over hers. "I meant, the truth about the old story you

speak of."

"But that's what I want to know, Newland--what I ought to know. I

couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to

somebody else. And I want to believe that it would be the same with

you. What sort of a life could we build on such foundations?"

Her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like

bowing himself down at her feet. "I've wanted to say this for a long

time," she went on. "I've wanted to tell you that, when two people

really love each other, I understand that there may be situations which

make it right that they should--should go against public opinion. And

if you feel yourself in any way pledged ... pledged to the person

we've spoken of ... and if there is any way ... any way in which you

can fulfill your pledge ... even by her getting a divorce ... Newland,

don't give her up because of me!"

His surprise at discovering that her fears had fastened upon an episode

so remote and so completely of the past as his love-affair with Mrs.

Thorley Rushworth gave way to wonder at the generosity of her view.

There was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox,

and if other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost

in wonder at the prodigy of the Wellands' daughter urging him to marry

his former mistress. But he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the

precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of

young-girlhood.

For a moment he could not speak; then he said: "There is no pledge--no

obligation whatever--of the kind you think. Such cases don't

always--present themselves quite as simply as ... But that's no matter

... I love your generosity, because I feel as you do about those things

... I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own

merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities ... I mean, each

woman's right to her liberty--" He pulled himself up, startled by the

turn his thoughts had taken, and went on, looking at her with a smile:

"Since you understand so many things, dearest, can't you go a little

farther, and understand the uselessness of our submitting to another

form of the same foolish conventionalities? If there's no one and

nothing between us, isn't that an argument for marrying quickly, rather

than for more delay?"

She flushed with joy and lifted her face to his; as he bent to it he

saw that her eyes were full of happy tears. But in another moment she

seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and

timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative

were all for others, and that she had none for herself. It was evident

that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied

composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had

dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in

its mother's arms.

Archer had no heart to go on pleading with her; he was too much

disappointed at the vanishing of the new being who had cast that one

deep look at him from her transparent eyes. May seemed to be aware of

his disappointment, but without knowing how to alleviate it; and they

stood up and walked silently home.

XVII.

"Your cousin the Countess called on mother while you were away," Janey

Archer announced to her brother on the evening of his return.

The young man, who was dining alone with his mother and sister, glanced

up in surprise and saw Mrs. Archer's gaze demurely bent on her plate.

Mrs. Archer did not regard her seclusion from the world as a reason

for being forgotten by it; and Newland guessed that she was slightly

annoyed that he should be surprised by Madame Olenska's visit.

"She had on a black velvet polonaise with jet buttons, and a tiny green

monkey muff; I never saw her so stylishly dressed," Janey continued.

"She came alone, early on Sunday afternoon; luckily the fire was lit

in the drawing-room. She had one of those new card-cases. She said she

wanted to know us because you'd been so good to her."

Newland laughed. "Madame Olenska always takes that tone about her

friends. She's very happy at being among her own people again."

"Yes, so she told us," said Mrs. Archer. "I must say she seems thankful

to be here."

"I hope you liked her, mother."

Mrs. Archer drew her lips together. "She certainly lays herself out to

please, even when she is calling on an old lady."

"Mother doesn't think her simple," Janey interjected, her eyes screwed

upon her brother's face.

"It's just my old-fashioned feeling; dear May is my ideal," said Mrs.

Archer.

"Ah," said her son, "they're not alike."

Archer had left St. Augustine charged with many messages for old Mrs.

Mingott; and a day or two after his return to town he called on her.

The old lady received him with unusual warmth; she was grateful to him

for persuading the Countess Olenska to give up the idea of a divorce;

and when he told her that he had deserted the office without leave, and

rushed down to St. Augustine simply because he wanted to see May, she

gave an adipose chuckle and patted his knee with her puff-ball hand.

"Ah, ah--so you kicked over the traces, did you? And I suppose Augusta

and Welland pulled long faces, and behaved as if the end of the world

had come? But little May--she knew better, I'll be bound?"

"I hoped she did; but after all she wouldn't agree to what I'd gone

down to ask for."

"Wouldn't she indeed? And what was that?"

"I wanted to get her to promise that we should be married in April.

What's the use of our wasting another year?"

Mrs. Manson Mingott screwed up her little mouth into a grimace of mimic

prudery and twinkled at him through malicious lids. "'Ask Mamma,' I

suppose--the usual story. Ah, these Mingotts--all alike! Born in a

rut, and you can't root 'em out of it. When I built this house you'd

have thought I was moving to California! Nobody ever _had_ built above

Fortieth Street--no, says I, nor above the Battery either, before

Christopher Columbus discovered America. No, no; not one of them wants

to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox. Ah, my dear

Mr. Archer, I thank my stars I'm nothing but a vulgar Spicer; but

there's not one of my own children that takes after me but my little

Ellen." She broke off, still twinkling at him, and asked, with the

casual irrelevance of old age: "Now, why in the world didn't you marry

my little Ellen?"

Archer laughed. "For one thing, she wasn't there to be married."

"No--to be sure; more's the pity. And now it's too late; her life is

finished." She spoke with the cold-blooded complacency of the aged

throwing earth into the grave of young hopes. The young man's heart

grew chill, and he said hurriedly: "Can't I persuade you to use your

influence with the Wellands, Mrs. Mingott? I wasn't made for long

engagements."

Old Catherine beamed on him approvingly. "No; I can see that. You've

got a quick eye. When you were a little boy I've no doubt you liked

to be helped first." She threw back her head with a laugh that made

her chins ripple like little waves. "Ah, here's my Ellen now!" she

exclaimed, as the portières parted behind her.

Madame Olenska came forward with a smile. Her face looked vivid and

happy, and she held out her hand gaily to Archer while she stooped to

her grandmother's kiss.

"I was just saying to him, my dear: 'Now, why didn't you marry my

little Ellen?'"

Madame Olenska looked at Archer, still smiling. "And what did he

answer?"

"Oh, my darling, I leave you to find that out! He's been down to

Florida to see his sweetheart."

"Yes, I know." She still looked at him. "I went to see your mother, to

ask where you'd gone. I sent a note that you never answered, and I was

afraid you were ill."

He muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and

having intended to write to her from St. Augustine.

"And of course once you were there you never thought of me again!" She

continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied

assumption of indifference.

"If she still needs me, she's determined not to let me see it," he

thought, stung by her manner. He wanted to thank her for having been

to see his mother, but under the ancestress's malicious eye he felt

himself tongue-tied and constrained.

"Look at him--in such hot haste to get married that he took French

leave and rushed down to implore the silly girl on his knees! That's

something like a lover--that's the way handsome Bob Spicer carried off

my poor mother; and then got tired of her before I was weaned--though

they only had to wait eight months for me! But there--you're not a

Spicer, young man; luckily for you and for May. It's only my poor Ellen

that has kept any of their wicked blood; the rest of them are all model

Mingotts," cried the old lady scornfully.

Archer was aware that Madame Olenska, who had seated herself at her

grandmother's side, was still thoughtfully scrutinising him. The gaiety

had faded from her eyes, and she said with great gentleness: "Surely,

Granny, we can persuade them between us to do as he wishes."

Archer rose to go, and as his hand met Madame Olenska's he felt that

she was waiting for him to make some allusion to her unanswered letter.

"When can I see you?" he asked, as she walked with him to the door of

the room.

"Whenever you like; but it must be soon if you want to see the little

house again. I am moving next week."

A pang shot through him at the memory of his lamplit hours in the

low-studded drawing-room. Few as they had been, they were thick with

memories.

"Tomorrow evening?"

She nodded. "Tomorrow; yes; but early. I'm going out."

The next day was a Sunday, and if she were "going out" on a Sunday

evening it could, of course, be only to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's. He

felt a slight movement of annoyance, not so much at her going there

(for he rather liked her going where she pleased in spite of the van

der Luydens), but because it was the kind of house at which she was

sure to meet Beaufort, where she must have known beforehand that she

would meet him--and where she was probably going for that purpose.

"Very well; tomorrow evening," he repeated, inwardly resolved that

he would not go early, and that by reaching her door late he would

either prevent her from going to Mrs. Struthers's, or else arrive after

she had started--which, all things considered, would no doubt be the

simplest solution.

It was only half-past eight, after all, when he rang the bell under

the wisteria; not as late as he had intended by half an hour--but

a singular restlessness had driven him to her door. He reflected,

however, that Mrs. Struthers's Sunday evenings were not like a ball,

and that her guests, as if to minimise their delinquency, usually went

early.

The one thing he had not counted on, in entering Madame Olenska's hall,

was to find hats and overcoats there. Why had she bidden him to come

early if she was having people to dine? On a closer inspection of the

garments besides which Nastasia was laying his own, his resentment

gave way to curiosity. The overcoats were in fact the very strangest

he had ever seen under a polite roof; and it took but a glance to

assure himself that neither of them belonged to Julius Beaufort. One

was a shaggy yellow ulster of "reach-me-down" cut, the other a very

old and rusty cloak with a cape--something like what the French called

a "Macfarlane." This garment, which appeared to be made for a person

of prodigious size, had evidently seen long and hard wear, and its

greenish-black folds gave out a moist sawdusty smell suggestive of

prolonged sessions against bar-room walls. On it lay a ragged grey

scarf and an odd felt hat of semiclerical shape.

Archer raised his eyebrows enquiringly at Nastasia, who raised hers in

return with a fatalistic "Gia!" as she threw open the drawing-room door.

The young man saw at once that his hostess was not in the room; then,

with surprise, he discovered another lady standing by the fire. This

lady, who was long, lean and loosely put together, was clad in raiment

intricately looped and fringed, with plaids and stripes and bands of

plain colour disposed in a design to which the clue seemed missing. Her

hair, which had tried to turn white and only succeeded in fading, was

surmounted by a Spanish comb and black lace scarf, and silk mittens,

visibly darned, covered her rheumatic hands.

Beside her, in a cloud of cigar-smoke, stood the owners of the two

overcoats, both in morning clothes that they had evidently not taken

off since morning. In one of the two, Archer, to his surprise,

recognised Ned Winsett; the other and older, who was unknown to

him, and whose gigantic frame declared him to be the wearer of the

"Macfarlane," had a feebly leonine head with crumpled grey hair,

and moved his arms with large pawing gestures, as though he were

distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude.

These three persons stood together on the hearth-rug, their eyes fixed

on an extraordinarily large bouquet of crimson roses, with a knot of

purple pansies at their base, that lay on the sofa where Madame Olenska

usually sat.

"What they must have cost at this season--though of course it's the

sentiment one cares about!" the lady was saying in a sighing staccato

as Archer came in.

The three turned with surprise at his appearance, and the lady,

advancing, held out her hand.

"Dear Mr. Archer--almost my cousin Newland!" she said. "I am the

Marchioness Manson."

Archer bowed, and she continued: "My Ellen has taken me in for a few

days. I came from Cuba, where I have been spending the winter with

Spanish friends--such delightful distinguished people: the highest

nobility of old Castile--how I wish you could know them! But I was

called away by our dear great friend here, Dr. Carver. You don't know

Dr. Agathon Carver, founder of the Valley of Love Community?"

Dr. Carver inclined his leonine head, and the Marchioness continued:

"Ah, New York--New York--how little the life of the spirit has reached

it! But I see you do know Mr. Winsett."

"Oh, yes--I reached him some time ago; but not by that route," Winsett

said with his dry smile.

The Marchioness shook her head reprovingly. "How do you know, Mr.

Winsett? The spirit bloweth where it listeth."

"List--oh, list!" interjected Dr. Carver in a stentorian murmur.

"But do sit down, Mr. Archer. We four have been having a delightful

little dinner together, and my child has gone up to dress. She expects

you; she will be down in a moment. We were just admiring these

marvellous flowers, which will surprise her when she reappears."

Winsett remained on his feet. "I'm afraid I must be off. Please tell

Madame Olenska that we shall all feel lost when she abandons our

street. This house has been an oasis."

"Ah, but she won't abandon _you_. Poetry and art are the breath of life

to her. It _is_ poetry you write, Mr. Winsett?"

"Well, no; but I sometimes read it," said Winsett, including the group

in a general nod and slipping out of the room.

"A caustic spirit--_un peu sauvage_. But so witty; Dr. Carver, you _do_

think him witty?"

"I never think of wit," said Dr. Carver severely.

"Ah--ah--you never think of wit! How merciless he is to us weak

mortals, Mr. Archer! But he lives only in the life of the spirit; and

tonight he is mentally preparing the lecture he is to deliver presently

at Mrs. Blenker's. Dr. Carver, would there be time, before you start

for the Blenkers' to explain to Mr. Archer your illuminating discovery

of the Direct Contact? But no; I see it is nearly nine o'clock, and we

have no right to detain you while so many are waiting for your message."

Dr. Carver looked slightly disappointed at this conclusion, but, having

compared his ponderous gold time-piece with Madame Olenska's little

travelling-clock, he reluctantly gathered up his mighty limbs for

departure.

"I shall see you later, dear friend?" he suggested to the Marchioness,

who replied with a smile: "As soon as Ellen's carriage comes I will

join you; I do hope the lecture won't have begun."

Dr. Carver looked thoughtfully at Archer. "Perhaps, if this young

gentleman is interested in my experiences, Mrs. Blenker might allow you

to bring him with you?"

"Oh, dear friend, if it were possible--I am sure she would be too

happy. But I fear my Ellen counts on Mr. Archer herself."

"That," said Dr. Carver, "is unfortunate--but here is my card." He

handed it to Archer, who read on it, in Gothic characters:

/c

+-----------------------+

| Agathon Carver |

| The Valley of Love |

| Kittasquattamy, N. Y. |

+-----------------------+

c/

Dr. Carver bowed himself out, and Mrs. Manson, with a sigh that might

have been either of regret or relief, again waved Archer to a seat.

"Ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, I am so glad of

this quiet moment with you."

Archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the Marchioness

continued, in her low sighing accents: "I know everything, dear Mr.

Archer--my child has told me all you have done for her. Your wise

advice: your courageous firmness--thank heaven it was not too late!"

The young man listened with considerable embarrassment. Was there

any one, he wondered, to whom Madame Olenska had not proclaimed his

intervention in her private affairs?

"Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave her a legal opinion, as she

asked me to."

"Ah, but in doing it--in doing it you were the unconscious instrument

of--of--what word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?"

cried the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids

mysteriously. "Little did you know that at that very moment I was being

appealed to: being approached, in fact--from the other side of the

Atlantic!"

She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard,

and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her

lips, breathed behind it: "By the Count himself--my poor, mad, foolish

Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms."

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed, springing up.

"You are horrified? Yes, of course; I understand. I don't defend poor

Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend. He does not

defend himself--he casts himself at her feet: in my person." She tapped

her emaciated bosom. "I have his letter here."

"A letter?--Has Madame Olenska seen it?" Archer stammered, his brain

whirling with the shock of the announcement.

The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly. "Time--time; I must have

time. I know my Ellen--haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade

unforgiving?"

"But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that

hell--"

"Ah, yes," the Marchioness acquiesced. "So she describes it--my

sensitive child! But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may stoop

to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up? Those roses

there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the open, in

his matchless terraced gardens at Nice! Jewels--historic pearls: the

Sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing for all these! Art

and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I always have;

and those also surrounded her. Pictures, priceless furniture, music,

brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear young man, if you'll excuse

me, is what you've no conception of here! And she had it all; and the

homage of the greatest. She tells me she is not thought handsome in

New York--good heavens! Her portrait has been painted nine times; the

greatest artists in Europe have begged for the privilege. Are these

things nothing? And the remorse of an adoring husband?"

As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an

expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer's

mirth had he not been numb with amazement.

He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first

sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger

of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to

him to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just

escaped.

"She knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly.

Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips. "Nothing directly--but

does she suspect? Who can tell? The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been

waiting to see you. From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had

taken, and of your influence over her, I hoped it might be possible to

count on your support--to convince you ..."

"That she ought to go back? I would rather see her dead!" cried the

young man violently.

"Ah," the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment. For a while

she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory fan

between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and

listened.

"Here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to

the bouquet on the sofa: "Am I to understand that you prefer _that_, Mr.

Archer? After all, marriage is marriage ... and my niece is still a

wife..."

XVIII.

"What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?" Madame Olenska cried

as she came into the room.

She was dressed as if for a ball. Everything about her shimmered and

glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams;

and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a

roomful of rivals.

"We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise

you with," Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly

to the flowers.

Madame Olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet. Her colour did

not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like

summer lightning. "Ah," she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the young

man had never heard, "who is ridiculous enough to send me a bouquet?

Why a bouquet? And why tonight of all nights? I am not going to a ball;

I am not a girl engaged to be married. But some people are always

ridiculous."

She turned back to the door, opened it, and called out: "Nastasia!"

The ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and Archer heard

Madame Olenska say, in an Italian that she seemed to pronounce

with intentional deliberateness in order that he might follow it:

"Here--throw this into the dustbin!" and then, as Nastasia stared

protestingly: "But no--it's not the fault of the poor flowers. Tell

the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of Mr.

Winsett, the dark gentleman who dined here. His wife is ill--they may

give her pleasure ... The boy is out, you say? Then, my dear one, run

yourself; here, put my cloak over you and fly. I want the thing out of

the house immediately! And, as you live, don't say they come from me!"

She flung her velvet opera cloak over the maid's shoulders and turned

back into the drawing-room, shutting the door sharply. Her bosom was

rising high under its lace, and for a moment Archer thought she was

about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the

Marchioness to Archer, asked abruptly: "And you two--have you made

friends!"

"It's for Mr. Archer to say, darling; he has waited patiently while you

were dressing."

"Yes--I gave you time enough: my hair wouldn't go," Madame Olenska

said, raising her hand to the heaped-up curls of her chignon. "But

that reminds me: I see Dr. Carver is gone, and you'll be late at the

Blenkers'. Mr. Archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?"

She followed the Marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a

miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from

the doorstep: "Mind, the carriage is to be back for me at ten!" Then

she returned to the drawing-room, where Archer, on re-entering it,

found her standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror.

It was not usual, in New York society, for a lady to address her

parlour-maid as "my dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped

in her own opera-cloak; and Archer, through all his deeper feelings,

tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action

followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.

Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a

second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself

into her sofa-corner, and sighed out: "There's time for a cigarette."

He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed

up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said: "What

do you think of me in a temper?"

Archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution: "It

makes me understand what your aunt has been saying about you."

"I knew she'd been talking about me. Well?"

"She said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and

amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here."

Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

"Medora is incorrigibly romantic. It has made up to her for so many

things!"

Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk. "Is your aunt's

romanticism always consistent with accuracy?"

"You mean: does she speak the truth?" Her niece considered. "Well, I'll

tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true and

something untrue. But why do you ask? What has she been telling you?"

He looked away into the fire, and then back at her shining presence.

His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening

by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry

her away.

"She says--she pretends that Count Olenski has asked her to persuade

you to go back to him."

Madame Olenska made no answer. She sat motionless, holding her

cigarette in her half-lifted hand. The expression of her face had not

changed; and Archer remembered that he had before noticed her apparent

incapacity for surprise.

"You knew, then?" he broke out.

She was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette. She

brushed it to the floor. "She has hinted about a letter: poor darling!

Medora's hints--"

"Is it at your husband's request that she has arrived here suddenly?"

Madame Olenska seemed to consider this question also. "There again: one

can't tell. She told me she had had a 'spiritual summons,' whatever

that is, from Dr. Carver. I'm afraid she's going to marry Dr. Carver

... poor Medora, there's always some one she wants to marry. But

perhaps the people in Cuba just got tired of her! I think she was with

them as a sort of paid companion. Really, I don't know why she came."

"But you do believe she has a letter from your husband?"

Again Madame Olenska brooded silently; then she said: "After all, it

was to be expected."

The young man rose and went to lean against the fireplace. A sudden

restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that

their minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the

wheels of the returning carriage.

"You know that your aunt believes you will go back?"

Madame Olenska raised her head quickly. A deep blush rose to her

face and spread over her neck and shoulders. She blushed seldom and

painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn.

"Many cruel things have been believed of me," she said.

"Oh, Ellen--forgive me; I'm a fool and a brute!"

She smiled a little. "You are horribly nervous; you have your own

troubles. I know you think the Wellands are unreasonable about your

marriage, and of course I agree with you. In Europe people don't

understand our long American engagements; I suppose they are not as

calm as we are." She pronounced the "we" with a faint emphasis that

gave it an ironic sound.

Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up. After all, she

had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs,

and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that

all he could do was to follow her lead. But the sense of the waning

hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier

of words should drop between them again.

"Yes," he said abruptly; "I went south to ask May to marry me after

Easter. There's no reason why we shouldn't be married then."

"And May adores you--and yet you couldn't convince her? I thought her

too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions."

"She _is_ too intelligent--she's not their slave."

Madame Olenska looked at him. "Well, then--I don't understand."

Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush. "We had a frank

talk--almost the first. She thinks my impatience a bad sign."

"Merciful heavens--a bad sign?"

"She thinks it means that I can't trust myself to go on caring for her.

She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from some

one that I--care for more."

Madame Olenska examined this curiously. "But if she thinks that--why

isn't she in a hurry too?"

"Because she's not like that: she's so much nobler. She insists all the

more on the long engagement, to give me time--"

"Time to give her up for the other woman?"

"If I want to."

Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed

eyes. Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her

horses.

"That _is_ noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice.

"Yes. But it's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous? Because you don't care for any one else?"

"Because I don't mean to marry any one else."

"Ah." There was another long interval. At length she looked up at him

and asked: "This other woman--does she love you?"

"Oh, there's no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking

of is--was never--"

"Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?"

"There's your carriage," said Archer.

She half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes. Her fan and gloves

lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically.

"Yes; I suppose I must be going."

"You're going to Mrs. Struthers's?"

"Yes." She smiled and added: "I must go where I am invited, or I should

be too lonely. Why not come with me?"

Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her

give him the rest of her evening. Ignoring her question, he continued

to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which

she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power

to make her drop them.

"May guessed the truth," he said. "There is another woman--but not the

one she thinks."

Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move. After a moment he sat

down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the

gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other

side of the hearth. "Ah, don't make love to me! Too many people have

done that," she said, frowning.

Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she

could have given him. "I have never made love to you," he said, "and I

never shall. But you are the woman I would have married if it had been

possible for either of us."

"Possible for either of us?" She looked at him with unfeigned

astonishment. "And you say that--when it's you who've made it

impossible?"

He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow

of light tore its blinding way.

"_I've_ made it impossible--?"

"You, you, _you_!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the

verge of tears. "Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it

up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must

sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ... and to

spare one's family the publicity, the scandal? And because my family

was going to be your family--for May's sake and for yours--I did what

you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do. Ah," she broke

out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for

you!"

She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of

her dress like a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the

fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving.

"Good God," he groaned. "When I thought--"

"You thought?"

"Ah, don't ask me what I thought!"

Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck

to her face. She sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity.

"I do ask you."

"Well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read--"

"My husband's letter?"

"Yes."

"I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing! All I

feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and May."

"Good God," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.

The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final

and irrevocable. It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his

own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever

lift that load from his heart. He did not move from his place, or raise

his head from his hands; his hidden eyeballs went on staring into utter

darkness.

"At least I loved you--" he brought out.

On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed

that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a

child's. He started up and came to her side.

"Ellen! What madness! Why are you crying? Nothing's done that can't

be undone. I'm still free, and you're going to be." He had her in

his arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain

terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise. The one thing that

astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes

arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her

made everything so simple.

She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her

stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up.

"Ah, my poor Newland--I suppose this had to be. But it doesn't in the

least alter things," she said, looking down at him in her turn from the

hearth.

"It alters the whole of life for me."

"No, no--it mustn't, it can't. You're engaged to May Welland; and I'm

married."

He stood up too, flushed and resolute. "Nonsense! It's too late for

that sort of thing. We've no right to lie to other people or to

ourselves. We won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying

May after this?"

She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her

profile reflected in the glass behind her. One of the locks of her

chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard

and almost old.

"I don't see you," she said at length, "putting that question to May.

Do you?"

He gave a reckless shrug. "It's too late to do anything else."

"You say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not

because it's true. In reality it's too late to do anything but what

we'd both decided on."

"Ah, I don't understand you!"

She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing

it. "You don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've

changed things for me: oh, from the first--long before I knew all you'd

done."

"All I'd done?"

"Yes. I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy of

me--that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person. It seems they

had even refused to meet me at dinner. I found that out afterward; and

how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der Luydens'; and how

you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the Beaufort ball, so

that I might have two families to stand by me instead of one--"

At that he broke into a laugh.

"Just imagine," she said, "how stupid and unobservant I was! I knew

nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day. New York simply

meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home. And I was so happy

at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and good,

and glad to see me. But from the very beginning," she continued, "I

felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons that

I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard and--unnecessary.

The very good people didn't convince me; I felt they'd never been

tempted. But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside

tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things

it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty

and indifference. That was what I'd never known before--and it's better

than anything I've known."

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and

each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning

lead. He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the

hearth rug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her

dress. Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.

She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at

him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.

"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried. "I can't go back

now to that other way of thinking. I can't love you unless I give you

up."

His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained

facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created.

Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.

"And Beaufort? Is he to replace me?"

As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of

anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own. But Madame

Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging

down before her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she

pondered a question.

"He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers's; why don't you go to

him?" Archer sneered.

She turned to ring the bell. "I shall not go out this evening; tell the

carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa," she said when the maid

came.

After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with

bitter eyes. "Why this sacrifice? Since you tell me that you're lonely

I've no right to keep you from your friends."

She smiled a little under her wet lashes. "I shan't be lonely now. I

_was_ lonely; I _was_ afraid. But the emptiness and the darkness are gone;

when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a

room where there's always a light."

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility,

and Archer groaned out again: "I don't understand you!"

"Yet you understand May!"

He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her. "May is ready

to give me up."

"What! Three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten

your marriage?"

"She's refused; that gives me the right--"

"Ah, you've taught me what an ugly word that is," she said.

He turned away with a sense of utter weariness. He felt as though he

had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and

now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way

and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.

If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away

her arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something

inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense

of her sincerity. At length he began to plead again.

"If we do this now it will be worse afterward--worse for every one--"

"No--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.

At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house. They had

heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless,

looking at each other with startled eyes.

Outside, Nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and

a moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the

Countess Olenska.

"The lady was very happy at the flowers," Nastasia said, smoothing her

apron. "She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and she

cried a little and said it was a folly."

Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope. She tore it open

and carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she

handed the telegram to Archer.

It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska.

In it he read: "Granny's telegram successful. Papa and Mamma agree

marriage after Easter. Am telegraphing Newland. Am too happy for words

and love you dearly. Your grateful May."

Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found

a similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and

letters. The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland, and

ran as follows: "Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve

Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May."

Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate

the news it contained. Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and

turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what

he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the

stairs.

A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which

served Janey as a dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped

impatiently on the panel. The door opened, and his sister stood before

him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown, with her hair "on

pins." Her face looked pale and apprehensive.

"Newland! I hope there's no bad news in that telegram? I waited on

purpose, in case--" (No item of his correspondence was safe from Janey.)

He took no notice of her question. "Look here--what day is Easter this

year?"

She looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance. "Easter? Newland!

Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?"

"The first week?" He turned again to the pages of his diary,

calculating rapidly under his breath. "The first week, did you say?" He

threw back his head with a long laugh.

"For mercy's sake what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter, except that I'm going to be married in a month."

Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast.

"Oh Newland, how wonderful! I'm so glad! But, dearest, why do you keep

on laughing? Do hush, or you'll wake Mamma."