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.  You have your own troubles. I know you think the wellens 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 someone 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 anyone else. Because I don't mean to marry anyone 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.� �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 guest 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. �Oh, 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 unfaigned astonishment. �And you say that, when it's you who have 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!  Give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice oneself to preserve the dignity of marriage and to spare one's family the publicity, the scandal.  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.  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 gravestone. 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. He started up and came to her side. �Ellen, what madness! Why are you crying? Nothing's done that can't be undone.  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. �Oh, 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 chignons 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 both decided on. �Oh, 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 Vanderleidens, 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.  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 that 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. �Oh, 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 Manna Molenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down before her, and her head slightly bent, as was her way when she pondered a question. �He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers. 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 Señor 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 been treated on your knees to hasten your marriage? She's refused.  He turned away with a sense of utter weariness. He felt as though he'd 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 odd sense of her sincerity. At length he began to plead again. �If we do this now it will be worse afterward, worse for everyone.� �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 señor 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 Bama agree marriage after Easter. I am telegraphing Newland. I am too happy for words and love you dearly. You are 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 Rannis 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 Janie as a dressing-room and boutoir, and her brother wrapped 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 Janie. He took no notice of her question. Look here, what day is Easter this year? She looked shocked at such un-Christian ignorance. Easter? Newland? Why, of course, the first week in April, why? The first week.  For mercy's sake, what's the matter? Nothing's the matter, except that I'm going to be married in a month.� Janie 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 my mom.� End of Chapter 18 End of Book 1 Book 2 Chapter 19 of The Age of Innocence This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Clett. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Book 2 Chapter 19 The day was fresh with a lively spring wind full of dust. All the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar. Newland Archer, at a signal from the Sexton, had come out of the vestry and placed himself with his best man on the chancel-step of Grace Church. The signal meant that the brome bearing the bride and her father was in sight, but there was sure to be a considerable interval of adjustment and consultation in the lobby where the bride's maids were already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms. During this unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness, was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled company, and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as through all the others, which made of a nineteenth-century New York wedding a right that seemed to belong to the dawn of history. Everything was equally easy, or equally painful, as one chose to put it, in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the same labyrinth. So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations. The bride's maids, eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies of the valley, had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye scarf-pin. Archer had set up half the night, trying to vary the wording of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and ex-lady-loves. The fees for the bishop and the rector were safely in the pocket of his best man, his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson Mingott's, where the wedding breakfast was to take place, and so were the travelling clothes into which he was to change, and a private compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young couple to their unknown destination, concealment of the spot in which the bridal night was to be spent, being one of the most sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual. Got the ring all right? whispered young van der Leiden Newland, who was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight of his responsibility. Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make. With his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark gray waistcoat and assured himself that the little gold circlet, engraved inside, Newland to May, April, 1870 blank, was in its place. Then resuming his former attitude, his tall hat, and pro-gray gloves with black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door of the church. Overhead Handel's march swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms. How like a first night at the opera! he thought, recognizing all the same faces in the same boxes, no pews, and wondering if, when the last trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Mary would be there with the same towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the same diamond earrings and the same smile, and whether suitable proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world. After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar countenances in the first rows, the women's sharp with curiosity and excitement, the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on their frock coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the wedding breakfast. Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's, the bridegroom could fancy Reggie Chibber's saying, but I'm told that Lovell Mingott insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if one can only get at it. And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding with authority, my dear fellow, haven't you heard, it's to be served at small tables, in the new English fashion. Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother, who had entered the church on Mr. Henry Vanderleiden's arm, sat weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands and her grandmother's ermine muff. Poor Janey, he thought, looking at his sister, even by screwing her head around she can only see the people on the few front pews, and their mostly dowdy newlands and dagonettes. On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved for the families, he saw Beaufort, tall and red-faced, scrutinizing the women with his arrogant stare. Beside him sat his wife, all silvery chinchilla and violets, and on the far side of the ribbon Lawrence Leffert's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the invisible deity of good form who presided at the ceremony. Archer wondered how many flaws Leffert's keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity, then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important. The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood. A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding present should be shown had darkened the last hours before the wedding, and it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the matter should have been decided, in the negative, by Mrs. Wellens saying, with indignant tears, I should as soon turn the reporters loose in my house. Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance. And all the while, I suppose, he thought, real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them. There they come, breathed the best man excitedly, but the bridegroom knew better. The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr. Brown, the livery stablekeeper, gowned in black in his intermittent character of Sexton, was taking a preliminary survey of the scene before marshalling his forces. The door was softly shut again. Then after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran through the church. The family. Mrs. Wellens came first on the arm of her eldest son. Her large pink face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale blue side-panels and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet met with general approval. But before she had settled herself with a stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's, the spectators were craning their necks to see who was coming after her. Wild rumours had been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at the ceremony. And the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk up the nave and squeeze into a seat. It was known that she had insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space between the seat and the front. But the result had been discouraging, and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous bath-chair, and sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel. The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the curb-stone. The idea of doing away with this awning and revealing the bride to the mob of dress-makers and newspaper reporters who stood outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas exceeded even old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the possibility. Why, they might take a photograph of my child and put it in the papers! Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was hinted to her, and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled with a collective shutter. The Ancestress had had to give in, but her concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding breakfast should take place under her roof, though, as the Washington Square connection said, with the Welland's house in easy reach it was hard to have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end of nowhere. Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons, a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law. Mrs. Lovell-Mingott had the high color and glassy stare induced in ladies of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress. But once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black chantilly over lilac satin, with a bonnet of parmaviolets, formed the happiest contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum color. Far different was the impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr. Mingott's arm in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and floating scarves, and as this last apparition glided into view, Archer's heart contracted and stopped beating. He had taken it for granted that the Martianess Manson was still in Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her niece, Madam Olenska. It was generally understood that their abrupt departure was due to Madam Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love, and in the circumstance as no one had expected either of the ladies to return for the wedding. For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Madora's fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her. But the little procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory maneuver, were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby. Newland! I say! She's here! The best man whispered. Archer roused himself with a start. A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating, for the white and rosy procession was in fact halfway up the nave. The bishop, the rector, and two white-winged assistants were hovering about the flower-banked altar, and the first cords of the spore symphony were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride. Archer opened his eyes. But could they really have been shut, as he imagined, and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task? The music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of tulle and orange blossoms floating near and nearer, the sight of Mrs. Archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory murmur of the rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink bridesmaids and the eight black ushers. All those sights, sounds, and sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his brain. My God! he thought. Have I got the ring? And once more he went through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture. Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened himself and smiled into her eyes. Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here, the rector began. The ring was on her hand, the bishop's benediction had been given, the bride's maids were a poise to resume their place in the procession, and the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the Mendelssohn march, without which no newly wedded couple had ever emerged upon New York. Your arm! I say, give her your arm! Young Newland nervously hissed, and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the unknown. What was it that it sent him there, he wondered? Perhaps the glimpse among the anonymous spectators in the transept of a dark coil of hair under a hat, which, a moment later, revealed itself as belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the person whose image he had evoked that he asked himself if he were becoming subject to hallucinations. And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day backening to them through widely-opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with big white favors on their frontlets, curviting and showing off at the far end of the canvas tunnel. The footman, who had a still bigger white favor on his lapel, wrapped May's white cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brome at her side.  Darling, Archer said, and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before him, and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully. Yes, of course, I thought I'd lost the ring. No wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a bridegroom didn't go through that. But you did keep me waiting, you know. I had time to think of every whore that might possibly happen. She surprised him by turning in full Fifth Avenue and flinging her arms about his neck. But none ever can happen now, can it, Newland, as long as we two are together. Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the young couple after the wedding breakfast had ample time to put on their travelling clothes, descend the wide mingot stairs between laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brome under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers, and there was still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last weeklies at the bookstore with the air of seasoned travellers, and settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new dressing-bag from London. The old Dulock aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal of the bridal couple, with the readiness inspired by the prospect of spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer, and Archer, glad to escape the usual bridal suite in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel, had accepted with an equal alacrity. May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where their mysterious retreat was situated. It was thought very English to have a country house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant wedding of the year. But where the house was no one was permitted to know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously, ah, they didn't tell us—which was manifestly true, since there was no need to. Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected. May was still, in look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher. At first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an inward tremor, but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil unawareness. She was alone for the first time with her husband, but her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday. There was no one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and the culminating lark of the whole delightful adventure of engagement and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grown-up person, like a married woman, in fact. It was wonderful that, as he had learned in the Mission Garden at St. Augustine, such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of imagination. But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience had been eased of its burden, and he saw that she would probably go through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance. Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person, as if she might have been chosen to pose for a civic virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element, yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding breakfast and of Granny Miget's immense and triumphant perversion of it. May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject. I was surprised, though, weren't you, that Aunt Medora came after all? Ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey. I do wish it had been she who had recovered. Did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me? He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay. Yes. I—No. Yes, it was beautiful. He said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards. Aren't you tired? It'll be good to have some tea when we arrive. I'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready. He rattled on, taking her hand in his, and her mind rushed away instantly to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore Silver, which the Beaufort's had sent, and which went so perfectly with Uncle Lovell Mingott's trays and side-dishes. In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage. Ah! how awfully kind of the van der Leiden's! They've sent their man over from Skydercliffe to meet us! Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them, and relieved the maid of her bags. I'm extremely sorry, sir, said this emissary, that a little accident has occurred at the Mistu Lax, a leak in the water-tank. It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Leiden, who heard of it this morning, sent a house made up by the early train to get the Patroon's house ready. It'll be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir, and the Mistu Lax have sent their cook over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you'd been at Rhinebeck. Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic accents. It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you. And May's eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed silence. The same as Rhinebeck, the Patroon's house! But it will be a hundred thousand times better, won't it, Newland? It's too dear and kind of Mr. van der Leiden to have thought of it. And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly. Only fancy! I've never been inside it, have you? The van der Leiden show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it was. She says it's the only house she's seen in America that she can imagine being perfectly happy in. Well, that's what we're going to be, isn't it? cried her husband gaily, and she answered with her boyish smile. Oh, it's just our luck beginning! The wonderful luck we're always going to have together! Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, Archer said, and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia-ware of their lodging-house breakfast-table. In all the rainy desert of autumnal London, there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew, and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not dignified to force oneself on the notice of one's acquaintances in foreign countries. Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their fellow travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a foreigner other than those employed in hotels and railway stations. Their own compatriots, save those previously known or properly accredited, they treated with an even more pronounced disdain. So that, unless they ran across a chivers, a dagonet, or a mingot, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken teta-tet. But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing, and one night at Botson, one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage, whose names, dress, and social situation were already intimately known to Janey, had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment. The other lady, the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry, had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis, and Mrs. Archer, who never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy. Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were travelling alone, they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious comforts, and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health. When the archers left Botson, they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Mrs. Harle again. Nothing to Mrs. Archer's mind would have been more undignified than to force oneself on the notice of a foreigner, to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the delightful Americans, who had been so kind at Botson. With touching fidelity, they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends, who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunson, and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer said it, made another thing of London to know Mrs. Carfry and Mrs. Harle, and by the time that Newland became engaged and the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought only right to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent in return a pretty bouquet of pressed alpine flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer's last word had been, You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry. Newland and his wife had no idea of obeying this injunction, but Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine, and it was over this invitation that May Archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins. It's all very well for you, Newland. You know them. But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I've never met. And what shall I wear? Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever. The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features. Or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness shining through like a light under ice. Where, dearest, I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris last week. Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan't know which to wear. She pouted a little. I've never dined out in London, and I don't want to be ridiculous. He tried to enter into her perplexity. But don't English women dress just like everybody else in the evening? Newland, how can you ask such funny questions, when they go to the theatre in old ball dresses and bare heads? Well, perhaps they wear new ball dresses at home, but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harrell won't. They'll wear caps, like my mother's, and shawls, very soft shawls. Yes, but how will the other women be dressed? Not as well as you, dear, he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes. She pushed back her chair with a sigh. That's dear of you, Newland, but it doesn't help me much. He had an inspiration. Why not wear your wedding dress? That can't be wrong, can it? Oh, dearest, if I only had it here, but it's gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back. Oh, well, said Archer, getting up. Look here, the fog's lifting. If we made a dash for the National Gallery, we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures. The Newland archers were on their way home, after a three-months wedding tour, which May, in writing to her girlfriends, vaguely summarised as, blissful. They had not gone to the Italian lakes. On reflection, Archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her own inclination, after a month with the Paris dressmakers, was for mountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretà, on the Normandy coast, which someone had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice in the mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said, There's Italy. And May, her feet in a gentian bed, had smiled cheerfully and replied, It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to be in New York. But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected. She regarded it, once her clothes were ordered, as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis. And when they finally got back to London, where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered his clothes, she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing. In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops, and she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris Café Chantin, where under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysées, she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant Terrace on an audience of cocotte, and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears. Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free, and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly, and a day might even come, as it once had, when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with the conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers, such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct, and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened he knew she would always be loyal, gallant, and unresentful, and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues. All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness, he would have chafed and rebelled. But since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mold as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences. Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion. But he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on as it always had, outside the domestic circle. And within it there would be nothing small and stifling, coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled. All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived. Archer, too, would have preferred to escape their friend's hospitality. In conformity with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sightseer and looker on, affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanized Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club. But it all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love affairs which they appear to feel the need of retailing to everyone they met, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question, and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company. Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of Sadastry, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognizing him, had said, Look me up, won't you? But no proper spirit at American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt, the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire. In fact they had purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives. Eventually there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's—London's a desert at this season—and you've made yourself much too beautiful. Archer said to May, who sat at his side in the handsome so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swans down that it seemed wicked to expose her to the London grime. I don't want them to think that we dress like savages! she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented, and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress. It's their armour, he thought, their defence against the unknown and their defiance of it. And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe. He had been rite in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small one. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found in the long chilly drawing-room only another shawl'd lady, a genial vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes, whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a French name as she did so. Into this dimly lit and dim-featured group, May Archer floated like a swan with a sunset on her. She seemed larger, fair, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her, and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness. "'What on earth will they expect me to talk about?' her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart, and the vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her ease. In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair. Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references. So that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The vicar soon abandoned the struggle, but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies to the manifest relief of all concerned went up to the drawing-room. The vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The car-fry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Le Mans. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted Monsieur Riviere, who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring, and Monsieur Riviere added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job. It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a thin, ugly face—May would certainly have called him common-looking—to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness, but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation. His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should soon follow the same career, but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man at a journalism, then into authorship, apparently unsuccessful, and at length, after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener, into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt-Grenier, had been advised by Moupasson not to attempt to write—even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honour—and had often talked with Mérimé in his mother's house. He had obviously been always desperately poor and anxious, having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for, and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation in fact seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett's, but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love that poor Ned Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager, impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty. You see, monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence. It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work, tutoring and private secretarieship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course, but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant à soi. And when one hears good talk, one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own, or one can listen and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation, there's nothing like it is there. The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism two different forms of the same self-abdication. He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. Voyez-vous, monsieur, to be able to look life in the face. That's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret, and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor, or a private anything, is almost as chilling through the imagination as a second secretarieship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a planche, an immense planche. Do you suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America, in New York? Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York, for a young man who had frequented the Goncourt and Flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living. He continued to stare at monsieur Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiority and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success. New York? New York? But must it be especially New York? He stammered. Utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity. A sudden flush rose under monsieur Riviere's sallow skin. I thought it's your metropolis. Is not the intellectual life more active there? He rejoined. Then, as if fearing to give his hear the impression of having asked a favour, he went on hastily. One throws out random suggestions more to oneself than to others. In reality I see no immediate prospect. And rising from his seat he added, without a trace of constraint. But the Mrs. Garfry would think that I ought to be taking you upstairs. During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode. His hour with monsieur Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first impulse had been to invite him to die in the next day. But he was beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses. That young tutor is an interesting fellow. We had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things. He threw out tentatively in the handsome. May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which she had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them. The little Frenchman, wasn't he dreadfully common? She questioned coldly. And he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French tutor. The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as snomishness, but by Old New York's sense of what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. If May's parents had entertained the Garfry's in Fifth Avenue, they would have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster. But Archer was on edge and took her up. Common? Common where? he queried. And she returned with unusual readiness. Why, I should say anywhere but in his schoolroom. Those people are always awkward in society. But then, she added disarmingly. I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever. Archer disliked her use of the word clever almost as much as her use of the word common, but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among, and he'd always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had never known a nice woman who looked at life differently, and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice. Ah! Then I won't ask him to dine, he concluded with a laugh, and May echoed bewildered. Goodness! Ask the Garfry's tutor! Well, not on the same day with the Garfry's if you prefer I shouldn't, but I did rather want another talk with him. He's looking for a job in New York. Her surprise increased with her indifference. He almost fancy that she suspected him of being tainted with foreignness. A job in New York? What sort of job? People don't have French tutors. What does he want to do? Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand. Her husband retorted perversely, and she broke into an appreciative laugh. Oh, Newland! Isn't that funny? Isn't that French? On the whole he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to invite Monsieur Riviere. Another after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of New York, and the more arm archer considered it the less he was able to fit Monsieur Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it. He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him. But as he paid the handsome and followed his wife's long train into the house, he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. After that I suppose we shall pretty nearly finish rubbing off each other's angles, he reflected. But the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep. CHAPTER XXI. The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea. The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour standing at their intervals along the winding path that led to the sea looped their petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel. Halfway between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house, which was also chocolate-coloured but with the tin roof of the veranda striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning, two large targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery. On the other side of the lawn facing the targets was pitched a real tent with benches and garden-seats about it. A number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or sat upon the benches, and every now and then a slender girl in starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their talk to watch the result. Newland Archer, standing on the veranda of the house, looked curiously down upon this scene. On each side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. A spiky green plant filled each pot, and below the veranda ran a wide border of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums. Behind him the French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave glimpses between swaying lace curtains of glassy parquet floors islanded with tints, poofs, dwarf arm-chairs, and velvet tables covered with trifles and silver. The Newport Archery Club always held its august meeting at the Beauforts. The sport which had hitherto known no rival but croquet was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn tennis, but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held their own. Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought home to him the extent of the change. In New York during the previous winter after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow house with the Beau window and the Pompeian best of yule he had dropped back into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper for May's brome, the wellans had given the carriage, and the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library, which in spite of family doubts and disapprovals had been carried out as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake bookcases, and sincere armchairs and tables. At the century he had found Winsett again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young man of his own set, and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home with an occasional evening at the opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business. But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated holiday-making. Archer had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine, called appropriately enough Mount Desert, where a few hardy Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in native cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild almost trapper-like existence amid woods and waters. But the wellans always went to Newport, where they owned one of the square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worthwhile for May to have worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be allowed to wear them, and this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as yet found no answer. May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. She reminded him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together. But as he stood on the Beaufort veranda and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn, it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all. It was not May's fault, poor dear. If now and then during their travels they had fallen slightly out of step, Harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to. He had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him, and he had been right. He had married, as most young men did, because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless, sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust, and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty. He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had fulfilled all that he had expected. It was undoubtedly gratifying to be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young married women in New York, especially when she was also one of the sweetest tempered and most reasonable of wives, and Archer had never been insensible to such advantages. As for the momentary madness which had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that he could ever in his senses have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts. But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been playing in a graveyard. He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Martianess Manson fluttered out of the drawing-room window. As usual she was extraordinarily festooned and bedisand, with a limp leg-horned hat anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over her much larger hat-brim. My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived.  Ah, business! Business! Professional duties, I understand. Many husbands I know find it impossible to join their wives here except for the weekend. She cocked her head on one side and languished at him through screwed-up eyes. But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I used often to remind my Ellen.  But this break of continuity must have been of the briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had apparently found voice to put. No, I am not staying here, but with the blankers and their delicious solitude at Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous charters for me this morning so that I might have at least a glimpse of one of Regina's garden-parties, but this evening I go back to rural life. The blankers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old farmhouse at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative people. She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim and added with a faint blush. This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a series of inner-thought meetings there. A contrast indeed to this gay scene of worldly pleasure, but then I have always lived on contrasts. To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen, beware of monotony, it's the mother of all the deadly sins. But my poor child is going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world. You know I suppose that she has declined all invitations to stay at Newport, even with her grandmother Mingot. I could hardly persuade her to come with me to the blankers, if you will believe it. The life she leads is morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me when it was still possible, when the door was still open. But shall we go down and watch this absorbing match? I hear your may as one of the competitors. Strolling toward them from the tent, Beaufort advanced over the lawn, tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frockcoat, with one of his own orchids in its buttonhole. Archer, who had not seen him for two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance. In the hot summer light his flooredness seemed heavy and bloated, and but for his erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an overfed and overdressed old man. There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort. In the spring he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new steam yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his company. The steam yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled bathrooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him half a million, and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are apt to be. Beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand the strain, and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in Fifth Avenue but in Wall Street. Some people said he had speculated unfortunately in railways others that he was being bled by one of the most insatiable members of her profession. And to every report of threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance, the building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string of race-horses, or the addition of a new masonier or cabanel to his picture-gallery. He advanced toward the Martianess and Newland with his usual half-sneering smile. Hello, Madora! Did the Trotters do their business? Forty minutes eh? Well, that's not so bad considering your nerves had to be spared. He shook hands with Archer, and then turning back with them placed himself on Mrs. Manson's other side, and said in a voice a few words which their companion did not catch. The Martianess replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a « Que voulez-vous? » which deepened Beaufort's frown. But he produced a good semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say « You know May's going to carry off the first prize. Ah, then it remains in the family! » Madora rippled, and at that moment they reached the tent, and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a relish cloud of mauve muslin and floating veils. May Welland was just coming out of the tent. In her white dress with a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the Beaufort ballroom on the night of her engagement. In the interval not a thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her heart, and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both, he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience moved away from her. She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the chalkmark traced on the turf, she lifted the bow to her shoulder and took aim. The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being. Her rivals, Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the merry girls, and diverse rosy Thorleys, Dagonettes, and others, stood behind her in a lovely anxious group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins and flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow. All were young and pretty and bathed in summer bloom, but not one had the nymph-like ease of his wife, when with tense muscles and a happy frown she bent her soul upon some feet of strength. Gadd, Archer heard Laurence Leffert say, not one of the lot holds as low as she does, and Beaufort retorted, yes, but that's the only kind of target she'll ever hit. Archer felt irrationally angry. His host's contemptuous tribute to May's niceness was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. The fact that a coarse-minded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality, yet the word sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if niceness carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bullseye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain. She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace. No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. But when her eyes met her husband's, her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his. Mrs. Wellin's basket-work pony carriage was waiting for them, and they drove off among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and Archer sitting at her side. The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorious dog carts, landows, and vis-à-vis, carrying well-dressed ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort Garden Party, or homeward from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive. Shall we go to see Granny? May suddenly proposed. I should like to tell her myself that I've won the prize. There's lots of time before dinner. Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue, crossed Spring Street, and drove out toward the Rocky Moreland beyond. In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage ornée, on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. Here in a thicket of stunted oaks her verandas spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of highly varnished walnut under a striped veranda roof, and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the enjoining one she spent her days, enthroned in a large arm-chair between the open door and window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air at set in motion stirred only the fringe of the antimacassars on the chair-arms. Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage, old Catherine had shown to archer the cordiality which a service-rendered excites toward the person served. She was persuaded that irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience, and being an ardent admirer of impulsiveness, when it did not lead to the spending of money, she always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of illusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious. She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been bought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things handsomely. Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear! the old lady chuckled. You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl! She pinched May's white arm and watched the colour flood her face. Well, well, what have I said to make you shake out the red flag? Ain't there going to be any daughters? Only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her blushing again all over blushes! What can't I say that, either? Mercy me! When my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out overhead, I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that nothing can shock. Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes. Well, now, tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall never get a straight word about it out of that silly Madora. The Ancestress continued, and as May exclaimed, Cousin Madora, but I thought she was going back to Portsmouth. She answered placidly, So she is, but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen. Oh, didn't you know Ellen had come to spend the day with me? Such falderol, her not coming for the summer, but I gave up arguing with young people about fifty years ago. Ellen? Ellen? She cried in her shrill old voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the veranda. There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott wrapped impatiently with her stick on the shiny floor.  Run down and fetch her like a good grandson. This pretty lady will describe the party to me," she said, and Archer stood up as if in a dream. He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during the last year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of her life in the interval. He knew that she had spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to have gone a great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly sublet the perfect house which Beaufort had been at such pains to find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington. There during the winter he had heard of her, as one always heard of pretty women in Washington, as shining in the brilliant diplomatic society that was supposed to make up for the social shortcomings of the administration. He had listened to these accounts and to various contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point of view, and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one listens to reminiscences of someone long since dead. Not till Midora suddenly spoke her name at the archery-match had Ellen Olenska become a living presence to him again. The Martianess's foolish lisp had called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street.  The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows. Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the lime-rock with its whitewashed turret, and the tiny house in which the heroic lighthouse-keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years. Beyond it lay the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of goat island, the bay spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to prudence island with its low growth of oaks, and the shores of Connecticut faint in the sunset haze. From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of pagoda-like summer house, and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning against the rail, her back to the shore. Archer stopped at the site as if he had asleep. That vision of the past was a dream, and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead. Was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at the door? Was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing with secret hopes? Was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue Avenue, and Mr. Welland already dressed for dinner and pasting the drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with disceptic impatience? For it was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is happening at a given hour. What am I? A son-in-law, Archer thought. The figure at the end of the pier had not moved. For a long moment the young man stood halfway down the bank, gazing at the bay, furrowed with the coming and going of sailboats, yacht launches, fishing-craft, and the trailing black coal barges hauled by noisy tugs. The lady in the summer house seemed to be held by the same sight. Beyond the gray bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a cat-boat as it beat out through the channel between the limerock and the shore. Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the shawgwin, and Montague lifting Aida Diaz's ribbons to his lips without her knowing that he was in the room. She doesn't know. She hasn't guessed. Shouldn't I know if she came up behind me, I wonder? He mused, and suddenly he said to himself, If she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the limerock light, I'll go back. The boat was gliding out on the receding tide. It slid before the limerock, blotted out Aida Lewis's little house, and passed across the turret in which the light was hung. Archer waited till a wide space of water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the boat, but still the figure in the summer house did not move. He turned and walked to the hill. I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen. I should have liked to see her again," May said as they drove home through the dusk. But perhaps she wouldn't have cared. She seems so changed. Changed? Echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on the pony's twitching ears.  She says she does it to keep her cousin Medora out of mischief, to prevent her marrying dreadful people, but I sometimes think we've always bored her. Archer made no answer, and she continued with a tinge of hardness that he had never before noticed in her frank, fresh voice. After all, I wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband. He burst into a laugh. Sanktas implicitas, he exclaimed, and as she turned a puzzled frown on him, he added, I don't think I ever heard you say a cruel thing before. Cruel? Well, watching the contortions of the dam is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels, but I believe even they don't think people happier in hell. It's a pity she ever married abroad, then, said May, in the placid tone with which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries, and Archer felt himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands. They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chambered wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the approach to Mr. Welland Villa. Lights were already shining through its windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his father-in-law exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room, watch in hand, and wearing the pained expression that he had long since found to be much more efficacious than anger. The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere so charged with renewed observances and exactions that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematized and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins. All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side, watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's daughters. A party for the blinkers, the blinkers! Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork, and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eyeglasses, read aloud in the tone of high comedy. Professor and Mrs. Emerson Silerton request the pleasure of Mr. and Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday afternoon club on August 25th at three o'clock punctually, to meet Mrs. and the Mrs. Blinker. Red Gables Catherine Street, RSVP. Good gracious! Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him. Poor Amy Silerton, you never can tell what her husband will do next, Mrs. Welland sighed. I suppose he's just discovered the blinkers. Professor Emerson Silerton was a thorn in the side of Newport Society, and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had had every advantage. His father was Silerton Jackson's uncle, his mother a panellow of Boston. On each side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing, as Mrs. Welland had often remarked, nothing on earth obliged Emerson Silerton to be an archeologist, or indeed a professor of any sort, or to live in Newport in winter, or do any of the other evolutionary things that he did. But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to expect something different, and money enough to keep her own carriage. No one in the mingot set could understand why Amy Silerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of husband, who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and when he travelled took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different from other people. And when they gave one of their dreary annual garden parties, every family on the cliffs, because of the Silerton-Penelot-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling representative. It's a wonder, Mrs. Welland remarked, that they didn't choose the Cup Race Day. Do you remember two years ago they're giving a party for a black man on the day of Julia Mingots the D'Enceau? Luckily, this time there's nothing else going on that I know of. For, of course, some one of us will have to go. Mr. Welland sighed nervously. Some of us, my dear, more than one? Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour. I have to be here at half-past three to take my drops. It's really no use trying to follow Bencombe's new treatment if I don't do it systematically. And if I join you later, of course, I shall miss my drive. At the thought he laid down his knife and fork again and a flush of anxiety rose to his finely wrinkled cheek. There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear. His wife answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic. I have some cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that she hasn't been slighted. She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter. And if Newland's afternoon is provided for, perhaps may can drive you out with the ponies and try their new russet harness. It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours should be what Mrs. Welland called provided for. The melancholy possibility of having to kill time, especially for those who did not care for wist or solitaire, was a vision that haunted her as the specter of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. Another of her principles was that parents should never, at least visibly, interfere with the plans of their married children, and the difficulty of adjusting this respect for maize and dependence with the exigency of Mr. Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for. Of course I'll drive with papa. I'm sure Newland will find something to do," may said in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his lack of response. It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days. Often already during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she inquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically, oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of spending it. And once, when she and May had had to go on a long postpone round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having lain in all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house. Newland never seems to look ahead! Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter, and May answered serenely, no, but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do, he reads a book. Ah, yes, like his father, Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an inherited oddity, and after that the question of Newland's unemployment was tacitly dropped. Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a tennis match at the Chiverses, or a sale on Julius Beaufort's cutter as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion. I shall be back by six, you know, dear. Papa never drives later than that. And she was not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a runabout and driving up the Ireland to a stud farm to look at a second horse for her brome. They had been looking for this horse for some time, and the suggestion was so acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if to say, you see, he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of us. The idea of the stud farm and the brome horse had germinated in Archer's mind on the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had first been mentioned, but he had kept it to himself as if there was clandestine in the plan and discovery might prevent its execution. He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance a runabout with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still do their eighteen miles on level roads, and at two o'clock hastily deserting the luncheon table he sprang into the light carriage and drove off. The day was perfect. A breeze from the north drove little puffs of white cloud across an ultramarine sky with a bright sea running under it. Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the stable lad at the corner of Mill Street, Archer turned down the old beach road and drove across Eastman's Beach. He had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on half-holidays at school, he used to start off into the unknown. Taking his pair at an easy gate, he counted on reaching the stud farm, which was not far beyond Paradise Rocks, before three o'clock, so that, after looking at the road, and trying him if he seemed promising, he would still have four golden hours to dispose of. As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party, he had said to himself that the Martianess Manson would certainly come to Newport with the blankers, and that Madame Olenska might again take the opportunity of spending the day with her grandmother. At any rate, the blanker habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it. He was not sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again, but ever since he had looked at her from the path above the bay, he had wanted irrationally and indescribably to see the place she was living in, and to follow the movements of her imagined figure, as he had watched the real one in the summer-house. The longing was with him day and night, an incessant, undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten. He did not see beyond the craving or picture what it might lead to, for he was not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her voice. He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the spot of earth she walked on and the way the sea and sky enclosed it, the rest of the world might seem less empty. When he reached the stud farm a glance showed him that the horse was not what he wanted, nevertheless he took a turn behind it and proved to himself that he was not in a hurry. But at three o'clock he shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-roads leading to Portsmouth. The wind had dropped, and a faint haze on the horizon showed that a fog was waiting to steal up the sacanet on the turn of the tide, but all about him fields and woods were steeped in golden light. He drove past grey shingled farmhouses in orchards, past hay-fields and groves of oak, with white steeples rising sharply into the fading sky. And at last, after stopping to ask the way of some men at work in a field he turned down a lane between high banks of golden rod and brambles. At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of the river. To the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from its clappards. On the roadside facing the gateways stood one of the open sheds in which the New Englanders sheltered his farming implements and visitors hitch their teams. Archer, jumping down, led his pair into the shed, and after tying them to a post turned towards the house. The patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field, but to the left an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled a ghostly summer-house of trellis work that had once been white, surmounted by a wooden cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but continued to take ineffectual aim. Archer leaned for a while against the gate. No one was in sight, and not a sound came from the open windows of the house. A grizzled Newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as the arrowless cupid. It was strange to think that this place of silence and decay was the home of the turbulent blinkers. Yet Archer was sure that he was not mistaken. For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and gradually falling under its drowsy spell. But at length he roused himself to the sense of the passing time. Should he look his fill and then drive away? He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the inside of the house so that he might picture the room that Madame Olenska sat in. There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the door and ringing the bell, if, as he supposed, she was away from the rest of the party, he could easily give his name and ask permission to go into the sitting-room to write a message. But instead he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden. As he entered it he caught sight of something bright-colored in the summer house and presently made it out to be a pink parasol. The parasol drew him like a magnet. He was sure it was hers. He went into the summer house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the silken thing and looked at the handle which was made of some rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent. Archer lifted the handle to his lips. He heard a rustle of skirts against the box and sat motionless, leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands and letting the rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes. He had always known that this must happen. Oh! Mr. Archer! exclaimed a loud young voice, and looking up he saw before him the youngest and largest of the Blanker Girls, blond and blowsy in bedraggled muslin. A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly. Gracious! Where did you drop from? I must have been asleep in the hammock. Everybody else has gone to Newport. Did you ring? She incoherently inquired. Archer's confusion was greater than hers. I—no, that is, I was just going to. I had to come up to the island to see about a horse, and I drove over on a chance of finding Mrs. Blanker and your visitors. But the house seemed empty so I sat down to wait. Miss Blanker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with increasing interest. The house is empty. Mother's not here or the Martianess or anybody but me. Her glance became faintly reproachful. Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are giving a garden party for Mother and all of us this afternoon? It was too unlucky that I couldn't go, but I've had a sore throat and Mother was afraid of the drive home this evening. Did you ever know anything so disappointing? Of course! she added gaily. I shouldn't have minded half as much if I'd known you were coming. Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her and Archer found the strength to break in. But Madame Olenska has she gone to Newport too? Miss Blanker looked at him with surprise. Madame Olenska, didn't you know she'd been called away? Called away. Oh! my best parasol! I lent it to that goose of a Katie because it matched her ribbons and the careless thing must have dropped it here. Blankers are all like that. Real Bohemians! Recovering the sunshade with a powerful hand, she unfurled it and suspended its rosy dome above her head. Yes! Ellen was called away yesterday. She lets us call her Ellen, you know. A telegram came from Boston. She said she might be gone for two days. I do love the way she does her hair, don't you? Miss Blanker rambled on. Archer continued to stare through her as if she had been transparent. All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its pinkness above her giggling head. After a moment he ventured, You don't happen to know why Madame Olenska went to Boston. I hope it was not on account of bad news. Miss Blanker took this with a cheerful incredulity. Oh! I don't believe so. She didn't tell us what was in the telegram. I think she didn't want the Martianess to know. She's so romantic looking, isn't she? Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott Siddins when she reads Lady Geraldine's courtship? Did you never hear her? Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts. His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him, and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the tumbledown house, under which the dusk was gathering. It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to have found Madame Olenska, and she was far away, and even the pink sunshade was not hers. He frowned and hesitated. You don't know, I suppose. I shall be in Boston tomorrow if I could manage to see her. He felt that Miss Blanker was losing interest in him though her smile persisted. Oh! of course! How lovely of you! Looking at the Parker House it must be horrible there in this weather. After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they exchanged. He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that he should wait the returning family and have high tea with them before he drove home. At length, with his hostess still at his side he passed out of range of the wooden cupid, unfastened his horses, and drove off. At the turn of the lane he left the house and waved the pink parasol. End of Chapter 22 Book 2 Chapter 23 of The Age of Innocence This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Klett The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton Book 2 Chapter 23 The next morning when Archer got out of the Fall River train in the coming mid-summer Boston the streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of borders going down the passage to the bathroom. Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast. Even the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no excessive heat ever degrades the European cities. The workers and Calico lounged on the doorsteps of the wealthy and the common looked like a pleasure ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic. If Archer had tried to imagine Eleanor Lenska in improbable scenes he could not have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat prostrated and deserted Boston. He breakfasted with appetite and method beginning with a slice of melon and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and a glass of cold eggs. A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had business in Boston and should take the Fall River both that night and go on to New York the following evening. It had always been understood that he would return to town early in the week and when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth, a letter from the office which fate had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table sufficed to justify his sudden plan. He was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done. It reminded him for an uncomfortable moment of Lawrence Leffert's masterly contrivances for securing his freedom. But this did not long trouble him for he was not in an analytic mood. After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the commercial advertiser. While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in and the usual greetings were exchanged. It was the same world after all though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the meshes of time and space. He looked at his watch and finding that it was half past nine got up and went into the writing room. There he wrote a few lines and ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the answer. He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House. The lady was out, sir. He heard a waiter's voice at his elbow and he stammered out as if it were a word in a strange language. He got up and went into the hall. It must be a mistake she could not be out at that hour. He flushed with anger at his own stupidity. Why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived? He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street. The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a traveler from distant lands. For a moment he stood on the doorstep hesitating, then he decided to go to the Parker House. What if the messenger had been misinformed and she were still there? He started to walk across the common and on the first bench under a tree he saw her sitting.  How could he ever have imagined her with a pink one? As he approached he was struck by her listless attitude. He looked there as if she had nothing else to do. He saw her drooping profile and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade. He came a step or two near and she turned and looked at him. Oh! she said. And for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face. But in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment. Oh! she murmured again on a different note as he stood looking down at her and without rising she made a place for him on the bench. I'm here on business, just got here Archer explained and without knowing why he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her. But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness? He really had no idea what he was saying. He felt as if he was shouting at her across endless distances to finish again before he could overtake her. I? Oh! I'm here on business too.  The words hardly reached him. He was aware only of her voice and of the startling fact that not an echo of it had remained in his memory. He had not even remembered that it was low pitched with a faint roughness on the consonants. You do your hair differently. He said, his heart beating and he had uttered something irrevocable. Differently? No, it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm without Nastasia. Nastasia? But isn't she with you? No, I'm alone. For two days it was not worthwhile to bring her. You're alone at the Parker House. She looked at him with a flash of her old malice. Does it strike you as dangerous? No, not dangerous. But unconventional. I see. I suppose it is. She considered a moment. I hadn't thought of it because I've just done something so much more unconventional. The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes. I've just refused to take back a sum of money that belonged to me. Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away. She had furled her parasol and sat absolutely drawing patterns on the gravel. Presently he came back and stood before her. Someone has come here to meet you. Yes. With this offer she nodded. And you refused because of the conditions. I refused she said after a moment. He sat down by her again. What were the conditions? Oh, they were not onerous. Just to sit at the head of his table now and then. There was another interval of silence. Archer's heart had slammed itself shot in the queer way it had and he sat vainly groping for a word. He wants you back at any price. Well, a considerable price. At least the sum is considerable for me. He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.  She stared and then burst into a laugh. Meet him. My husband. Here. At this season he's always at co- or boden. He sent someone. Yes. With a letter. She shook her head. No, just a message. He never writes. I don't think I've had more than the illusion brought the color to her cheek and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid blush. Why does he never write? Why should he? What does one have secretaries for? The young man's blush deepened. She had pronounced the words if it had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary. For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask, did he send his secretary then? But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter to his wife was too present to him. He paused again and then took another plunge. And the person? The emissary? The emissary? Madame Olenski rejoined still smiling. Might for all I care have left already. But he has insisted on waiting till this evening. In case, on the chance. And you came out here to think the chance over. I came out to get a breath of air. The hotel's too stifling. I'm taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth. They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the people passing along the path.  He felt like answering, I was till I saw you again. But instead he stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park. This is horrible. Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay? There's a breeze and it will be cooler. We might take the steamboat down to Point Arleigh. She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went on. On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat. My train doesn't leave till evening. I'm going back to New York. Why shouldn't we? He insisted, looking down at her. And suddenly he broke out. Haven't we done all we could? Oh! she murmured again. She stood up and reopened her sunshade, glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene and assure herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.   I'll say anything you like. Or nothing. I won't open my mouth unless you tell me to. What harm can it do to anybody? All I want is to listen to you. He stammered. She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enameled chain. Oh! don't calculate! he broke out. Give me the day. I want to get you away from that man. At what time was he coming? Her color rose again. At eleven. Then you must come at once. You needn't be afraid, if I don't come. Nor you either, if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met. It may be another hundred before we meet again.  Why didn't you come down to the beach to fetch me the day I was at Granny's? She asked. Because you didn't look round. Because you didn't know I was there. I swore I wouldn't unless you looked round. He laughed as the childishness of the confession struck him. But I didn't look round on purpose. On purpose? I knew you were there. When you drove in I recognized the ponies, so I went down to the beach. To get away from me as far as you could. She repeated in a low voice. To get away from you as far as I could. He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. Well, you see it's no use. I may as well tell you, he added, that the business I came here for was just to find you. But look here, we must start or we shall miss our boat. Our boat? She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled. Oh, but I must go back to the hotel first. I must leave a note. As many notes as you please, you can write here. He drew out a note case and one of the new stylographic pens. I've even got an envelope. You see how everything's predestined. There, steady the thing on your knee and I'll get the pen going in a second. They have to be humoured. Wait. He banged the hand that held the pen against the back of the bench. It's like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer. Just a trick. Now try. She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on his note case began to write. Archer walked away a few steps, staring with radiant, unseeing eyes at the passers-by, who in their turn paused to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in the common. Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it, and put it into her pocket. Then she too stood up. They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined herdick which had carried his note to the Parker House and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant. I told you everything was predestined. Here's a cab for us. You see?" They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cab stands were still a foreign novelty. Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the Parker House before going to the steamboat landing. They rattled through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel. Archer held at his hand for the letter. Shall I take it in? he asked. But Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared through the glazed doors. It was barely half past ten. But what if the emissary impatient for her reply and not knowing how else to employ his time were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in? He waited, pacing up and down before the herdick. A Sicilian youth with eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots and an Irish matron to sell him peaches. And every few moments the doors opened to let out hot men with straw hats tilted far back who glanced at him as they went by. He marveled that the door should open so often and that all the people at let out should look so like each other and so like all the other hot men who at that hour through the length and breadth of the land were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of hotels. And then suddenly came a face that he could not relate to the other faces. He caught but a flash of it for his pacing said carried him to the farthest point of his beat and it was in turning back to the hotel that he saw in a group of typical countenances, the Lank and Weary, the Round and Surprised, the Lantern Jod and Mild, this other face that was so many more things at once and things so different. It was that of a young man, pale too and half extinguished by the heat or worry or both, but somehow quicker, vivider, more conscious, or perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of memory but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing face, apparently that of some foreign businessman looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of passers-by and Archer resumed his patrol. He did not care to be seen watchin' hand within view of the hotel and his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she had met the emissary and been way laid by him. At the thought Archer's apprehension rose to anguish. If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said. The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the herdic and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she'd been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to the wharf. Seated side by side on a bench of the half empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation. As the paddle-wheels began to turn and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling, the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return. But he was afraid to say it or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips. The day before even on the drive to Portsmouth the thought of her had run through him like fire. But now that she was beside him and they were drifting forth into this unknown world they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder. As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and broke up into long oily undulations then into ripples tipped with spray. The fog of saltiness still hung over the city but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters and distant promontories with lighthouses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a long veil about her hat but it left her face uncovered and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course and to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters nor, what was worse, unduly elated by their possibility. In the bare dining-room of the inn which she had hoped they would have to themselves they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and women, school-teachers on a holiday the landlord told them and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through their noise. This is hopeless. I'll ask for a private room," he said, and Madame Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it. The room opened on a long wooden veranda with the sea coming in at the windows. It was bare and cool with a table covered with a coarse-checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. No more guileless-looking cabinet particularly ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple. Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him. A woman who had run away from her husband and reputedly with another man was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for granted, but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so quiet, so unsurprised, and so simple, she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other. End of Chapter 23 Book II. Chapter 24. Of the Age of Innocence. This Librivox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Elizabeth Klett. The Age of Innocence. By Edith Wharton. Book II. Chapter 24. They lunged slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk, for the spell once broken they had much to say, and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with conscious intention, but because he did not want to miss a word of her history. And leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met. She had grown tired of what people call society. New York was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable, she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back, but after the first flush of novelty, she had found herself, as she phrased it, too different to care for the things it cared about, and so she had decided to try Washington, where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion. And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington and make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils. But Dr. Carver, aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he's been staying with you at the Blankers. She smiled. Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert. A convert to what? To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But do you know? They interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition, somebody else's tradition, that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country. She smiled across the table. Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the opera with the Selfridge Marys? Archer changed colour. And Beaufort, do you say these things to Beaufort? He asked abruptly. I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to. And he understands. Ah, it's what I've always told you. You don't like us. And you like Beaufort because he's so unlike us. He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore. We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour, no variety. I wonder, he broke out, why you don't go back? Her eyes darkened and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she sat silent as if thinking over what he had said and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too. At length she said, I believe it's because of you. It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. Archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak. It was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed. At least, she continued, It was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don't know how to explain myself. She drew together her troubled brows. But it seems as if I'd never before understood with how much that his hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid. Exquisite pleasures. It's something to have had them. He felt like retorting, but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent. I want, she went on, to be perfectly honest with you and with myself, for a long time I've hoped this chance would come that I might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me. Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with a laugh. And what do you make out that you've made of me? She paled a little. Of you? Yes. For I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I'm the man who married one woman because another one told him to. Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. I thought, you promised, you were not to say such things today. Ah, how like a woman, none of you will ever see a bad business through. She lowered her voice. Is it a bad business? For me. He stood in the window drumming against the raised sash and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her cousin's name. For that's the thing we've always got to think of, haven't we, by your own showing?" she insisted. My own showing, he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea. Or if not, she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful application. If it's not worth while to have given up to have missed things so that others may be saved from disillusionment and misery, then everything I came home for, everything that made my other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took account of them, all these things are a sham or a dream. He turned around without moving from his place. And in that case there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back. He concluded for her. Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. Oh, is there no reason? Not of you staked your all on the success of my marriage. My marriage, he said savagely, isn't going to be a sight to keep you here. She made no answer and he went on. What's the use? You gave me my first glimpse of a real life and at the same moment you asked me to go on with the sham one. It's beyond human enduring. That's all. Say that, when I'm enduring it.  Her arms had dropped along the table and she sat with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril. The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person with the soul behind it. Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him. You too. Oh, all this time. You too. For answer she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward. Half the width of the room was still between them and neither made any show of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence. He would hardly have been aware of it if one of her hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little twenty-third street house, he had kept his eyes on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex, but still he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them, but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which might have faced the sound and impression of her words. His one thought that he should never again feel quite alone. But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they were, close together and safe and shut in, yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart. What's the use? When will you go back? He broke out. A great, hopeless, How on earth can I keep you crying out to her beneath his words? She sat motionless with lowered lids. Oh, I shan't go yet. Not yet. Some time then. Some time that you already foresee. At that she raised her clearest eyes. I promise you, not as long as you hold out, not as long as we can look straight at each other like this. He dropped into his chair. What her answer really said was, If you lift a finger, you'll drive me back, back to all the abominations you know of and all the temptations you half-guess. He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.  Oh, as long as it's a part of yours and mine a part of yours, she nodded. And that's to be all, for either of us. Well, it is all, isn't it? At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the worst of the tasks were done, and she had only to wait. So quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted not as a check, but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while her arms extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her surrendered face, say the rest. They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few moments, but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing to make this meeting their last. He must leave their future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it. Don't—don't be unhappy, she said, with a break in her voice as she drew her hands away, and he answered, You won't go back. You won't go back. As if it were the one possibility he could not bear. I won't go back, she said, and turning away she opened the door and led the way into the public dining-room. The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf. Across the beach lay the white steam-boat at the pier, and over the sunlit waters, Boston loomed in a line of haze. End of Chapter 24 Once more on the boat and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquility of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him. The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ridiculous failure. He had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others and their honesty to themselves that had stirred and yet tranquilized him. A balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and her faltering showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over, and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped hands for a goodbye at the fall river station, and he had turned away alone, the action remained with him of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed. He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second of their hours together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning to Europe, returning to her husband, it would not be because her old life tempted her, even on the new terms offered. No. Only if she felt herself becoming a temptation to archer, a temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer, and it depended on himself to keep her just there, safe, but secluded. In the train these thoughts were still with him. They enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote and indistinct. He had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow travellers they would not understand what he was saying. In this state of abstraction he found himself the following morning, waking to the reality of a stifling September day in New York. The heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him, and he continued to stare at them through the same golden blur. But suddenly, as he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer and forced itself upon his consciousness. It was, as he instantly recalled, the face of the young man he had seen the day before passing out of the Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to type, as not having an American hotel face. The same thing struck him now, and again he became aware of a dim stir of former associations. The young man stood looking about him with the dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American travel. Then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his hat, and said in English, Surely, monsieur, we met in London. Ah, to be sure, in London! Archer grasped his hand with curiosity and sympathy. So you did get here after all. He exclaimed, casting a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young car-fries French tutor. Uh, I got here, yes. Monsieur Riviere smiled with drawn lips. But not for long. I return the day after to-morrow. He stood grasping his light valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly, almost appealingly into Archer's face. I wonder, monsieur, since I've had the good luck to run across you if I might. I was just going to suggest it. Come to lunch, and won't you? Downtown, I mean. If you'll look me up in my office, I'll take you to a very decent restaurant in that quarter. Monsieur Riviere was visibly touched and surprised. You're too kind. But I was only going to ask if you would tell me which some sort of convenience. There are no porters, and no one here seems to listen. I know, our American stations must surprise you. When you ask for a porter, they give you chewing-gum. But if you'll come along, I'll extricate you, and you really must lunch with me, you know. The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied with profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction, that he was already engaged. But when they had reached the comparative reassurance he asked if he might call that afternoon. Archer, at ease in the mid-summer leisure of the office, fixed an hour and scribbled his address, which the Frenchman pocketed with reiterated thanks and a wide flourish of his hat. A horse-car received him, and Archer walked away. Punctually at the hour Monsieur Riviere appeared, shaved, smoothed out, but still unmistakably drawn and serious. Archer was alone in his office, and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began abruptly. I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston. The statement was insignificant enough, and Archer was about to frame an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze. It is extraordinary, very extraordinary, Monsieur Riviere continued, that we should have met in the circumstances in which I find myself. What circumstances? Archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he needed money. Monsieur Riviere continued to study him with tentative eyes. I have come not to look for employment, as I spoke of doing when we last met, but on a special mission. Ah! Archer exclaimed. In a flash the two meetings had connected themselves in his mind. He paused to take in the situation, thus suddenly lighted up for him, and Monsieur Riviere also remained silent, as if aware that what he had said was enough. A special mission! Archer at length repeated. The young Frenchman opening his palms raised them slightly, and the two men continued to look at each other across the office desk till Archer roused himself to say, do sit down. Whereupon Monsieur Riviere bowed took a distant chair and again waited. It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me! Archer finally asked. Monsieur Riviere bent his head. Not on my own behalf. On that score I have—I have fully dealt with myself. I should like, if I may, to speak to you about Sir Countess Olenska. Archer had known for the last few minutes that th