It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.

The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role
and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.  The popularity of the
admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always
packed the house.  In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in
the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed
sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as
the galleries did.

There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to
ceiling.  It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost
monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and
turned to go.  The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and
looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without
fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and
flowing in long lines about her feet.  Around her neck was a narrow
black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.

When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the
mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands.  On the threshold he
paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of
velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or
changing her attitude.  And on this silent parting the curtain fell.

It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer
went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada
Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in
Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its
dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic
outpourings.

On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy
by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from
Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.

It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the
two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned.
Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young
English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall
red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly
face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance.  Nor were
Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;
they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the
lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case.  Wherein,
then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a
kind of retrospective excitement?  It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's
mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities
outside the daily run of experience.  She had hardly ever said a word
to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a
projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something
inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself.  Archer had
always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a
small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency
to have things happen to them.  This tendency he had felt from the
first in Madame Olenska.  The quiet, almost passive young woman struck
him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen,
no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to
avoid them.  The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so
thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently
passed unperceived.  It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in
her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very
maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those
she had rebelled against.

Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation
was not unfounded.  The mysterious person who figured in his wife's
past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share
in her escape.  The conditions from which she had fled were
intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was
frightened, she was desperate--what more natural than that she should
be grateful to her rescuer?  The pity was that her gratitude put her,
in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable
husband.  Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do;
he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on
whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the
place where she could least hope for indulgence.

To have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned
acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful to him.  He felt himself
drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her
dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing
her.  He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather
than to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze
of her family.  He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both
that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her
decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the
proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes
from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them.

"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of
her future son-in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a
confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and
added impatiently:  "Silly goose!  I told her myself what nonsense it
was.  Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid,
when she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"

These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame
Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the
parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up
to leave the theatre.

In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the
lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts,
Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men.  He had not spoken with her
alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being with
her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised
him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of
invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.

Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs.
Beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk,
Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska.  There was no one else in
the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a
confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday
reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing).
Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort
listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle
to be seen in profile from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke
in a low voice.

"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her
a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"

Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise.  He had called
only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of
yellow roses, and each time without a card.  She had never before made
any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of
him as the sender.  Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her
associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him
with an agitated pleasure.

"I was thinking of that too--I was going to leave the theatre in order
to take the picture away with me," he said.

To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily.  She looked
down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands,
and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"

"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.

In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the
previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed
susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the
latter part of the winter.  Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with
no opinions but with many habits.  With these habits none might
interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should
always go with him on his annual journey to the south.  To preserve an
unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not
have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for
his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.

As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland
was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife
and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were
both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always
joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.

It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's
accompanying her father.  The reputation of the Mingotts' family
physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr.
Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was
therefore inflexible.  Originally, it had been intended that May's
engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and
the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to
alter Mr. Welland's plans.  Archer would have liked to join the
travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his
betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions.  Little
arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted
of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a
holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the
resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal
constituents of married life.

He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered
lids.  "I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said
abruptly.

"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject
at such a moment.

"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly;
"but sometimes life is difficult ...  perplexing..."

"I know."

"And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were right; and that I'm
grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her
eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke
in on them.

Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.

Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which,
with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in
their absence.  "She likes you and admires you so much--and you know,
though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy.  I
don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either;
they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she
is.  And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though
the family won't admit it.  I think she's been used to lots of things
we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and
celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.
Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and
clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York
who can talk to her about what she really cares for."

His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter!  But he had not
meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not
care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame
Olenska's champion.  He had an idea that she knew how to take care of
herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined.  She had
Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a
protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among
them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance.  Yet he never
saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,
May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination.  Ellen
Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.

As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,
the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he
cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of
club and chop-house banter.

He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby
round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the
Beaufort box.  The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at
a little German restaurant around the corner.  Archer, who was not in
the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined
on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said:  "Oh,
well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice
too."

They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said:  "Look here,
what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of
yours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she?  The one your friend Lefferts
seems so smitten by."

Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed.  What the
devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name?  And above all,
why did he couple it with Lefferts's?  It was unlike Winsett to
manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a
journalist.

"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.

"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined.  "The
fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to
settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down
her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut.  She rushed
in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully
bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too
dazzled to ask her name."

A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart.  There was nothing
extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a
neighbour's child.  But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed
in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor
Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.

"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."

"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett.  "Well, I didn't know
Countesses were so neighbourly.  Mingotts ain't."

"They would be, if you'd let them."

"Ah, well--"  It was their old interminable argument as to the
obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the
fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.

"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our
slum?"

"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of
our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his
own picture of her.

"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented.  "Well,
here's my corner."

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and
musing on his last words.

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most
interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had
allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are
still struggling.

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never
seen them.  The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of
journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett
had proposed to go for a bock.  He had given Archer to understand that
his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might
merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes,
or in both.  Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social
observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it
cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to
consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in
a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring
"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their
clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the
number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less
self-conscious than the others.  Nevertheless, he was always stimulated
by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean
bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner
and carry him off for a long talk.

Winsett was not a journalist by choice.  He was a pure man of letters,
untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after
publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of
which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and
the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to
make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real
calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where
fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England
love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was
inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile
bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.  His
conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and
feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still
less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and
curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views
usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once
said.  "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it.  I've got only
one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in
my time.  But you're free and you're well-off.  Why don't you get into
touch?  There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."

Archer threw his head back and laughed.  There one saw at a flash the
unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the
others--Archer's kind.  Every one in polite circles knew that, in
America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics."  But, since he could
hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at
the career of the honest man in American politics!  They don't want us."

"Who's 'they'?  Why don't you all get together and be 'they'
yourselves?"

Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy
fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal
or state politics in New York.  The day was past when that sort of
thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the
emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

"Culture!  Yes--if we had it!  But there are just a few little local
patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and
cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition that
your forebears brought with them.  But you're in a pitiful little
minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience.  You're
like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house:  'The Portrait of a
Gentleman.'  You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll
up your sleeves and get right down into the muck.  That, or emigrate
... God!  If I could emigrate ..."

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back
to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.
Emigrate!  As if a gentleman could abandon his own country!  One could
no more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into
the muck.  A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained.  But you
couldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New
York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake
made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a
smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms
of Fifth Avenue.

The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived
that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was
filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.
Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine
with May Welland?  No one was deceived by his pretense of professional
activity.  In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr.
Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the
management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there were
always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without
professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day,
sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the
newspapers.  Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an
occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as
derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more
gentlemanly pursuit than business.  But none of these young men had
much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire
to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was
already perceptibly spreading.

It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations
in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and
generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to
Madame Olenska.  But once he was married, what would become of this
narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived?  He had
seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though
perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and
luxurious routine of their elders.

From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking
if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a
reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive
any letter the following day.  This unexpected silence mortified him
beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of
yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there.  It was
only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the
Countess Olenska.  To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,
whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the
Duke on board his steamer.

"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual
preliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind
friends have taken me in.  I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.
You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe
here.  I wish that you were with us."  She ended with a conventional
"Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.

The tone of the note surprised the young man.  What was Madame Olenska
running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe?  His first
thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he
did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque
exaggeration.  Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not
wholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were
translating from the French.  "Je me suis evadee--" put in that way,
the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have
wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very
likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of
the pleasure of the moment.

It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off
to Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite
period.  The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to
visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few
thus privileged.  But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, the
delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he
remembered M.  Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the
young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier.  The van der Luydens
had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there
were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that
beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on
rescuing her.

He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and
almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused
an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses
at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.

He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank,
with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a
general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes.  He had
just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had
preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils.  But
he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and
told the servant to send it immediately.  He knew that Mrs. Reggie
didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that
there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.

Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on
Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a
week-end at Highbank.

In the morning he had a spin in the ice-boat with his hostess and a few
of the hardier guests; in the afternoon he "went over the farm" with
Reggie, and listened, in the elaborately appointed stables, to long and
impressive disquisitions on the horse; after tea he talked in a corner
of the firelit hall with a young lady who had professed herself
broken-hearted when his engagement was announced, but was now eager to
tell him of her own matrimonial hopes; and finally, about midnight, he
assisted in putting a gold-fish in one visitor's bed, dressed up a
burglar in the bath-room of a nervous aunt, and saw in the small hours
by joining in a pillow-fight that ranged from the nurseries to the
basement.  But on Sunday after luncheon he borrowed a cutter, and drove
over to Skuytercliff.

People had always been told that the house at Skuytercliff was an
Italian villa.  Those who had never been to Italy believed it; so did
some who had.  The house had been built by Mr. van der Luyden in his
youth, on his return from the "grand tour," and in anticipation of his
approaching marriage with Miss Louisa Dagonet.  It was a large square
wooden structure, with tongued and grooved walls painted pale green and
white, a Corinthian portico, and fluted pilasters between the windows.
From the high ground on which it stood a series of terraces bordered by
balustrades and urns descended in the steel-engraving style to a small
irregular lake with an asphalt edge overhung by rare weeping conifers.
To the right and left, the famous weedless lawns studded with
"specimen" trees (each of a different variety) rolled away to long
ranges of grass crested with elaborate cast-iron ornaments; and below,
in a hollow, lay the four-roomed stone house which the first Patroon
had built on the land granted him in 1612.

Against the uniform sheet of snow and the greyish winter sky the
Italian villa loomed up rather grimly; even in summer it kept its
distance, and the boldest coleus bed had never ventured nearer than
thirty feet from its awful front.  Now, as Archer rang the bell, the
long tinkle seemed to echo through a mausoleum; and the surprise of the
butler who at length responded to the call was as great as though he
had been summoned from his final sleep.

Happily Archer was of the family, and therefore, irregular though his
arrival was, entitled to be informed that the Countess Olenska was out,
having driven to afternoon service with Mrs. van der Luyden exactly
three quarters of an hour earlier.

"Mr. van der Luyden," the butler continued, "is in, sir; but my
impression is that he is either finishing his nap or else reading
yesterday's Evening Post.  I heard him say, sir, on his return from
church this morning, that he intended to look through the Evening Post
after luncheon; if you like, sir, I might go to the library door and
listen--"

But Archer, thanking him, said that he would go and meet the ladies;
and the butler, obviously relieved, closed the door on him majestically.

A groom took the cutter to the stables, and Archer struck through the
park to the high-road.  The village of Skuytercliff was only a mile and
a half away, but he knew that Mrs. van der Luyden never walked, and
that he must keep to the road to meet the carriage.  Presently,
however, coming down a foot-path that crossed the highway, he caught
sight of a slight figure in a red cloak, with a big dog running ahead.
He hurried forward, and Madame Olenska stopped short with a smile of
welcome.

"Ah, you've come!" she said, and drew her hand from her muff.

The red cloak made her look gay and vivid, like the Ellen Mingott of
old days; and he laughed as he took her hand, and answered:  "I came to
see what you were running away from."

Her face clouded over, but she answered:  "Ah, well--you will see,
presently."

The answer puzzled him.  "Why--do you mean that you've been overtaken?"

She shrugged her shoulders, with a little movement like Nastasia's, and
rejoined in a lighter tone:  "Shall we walk on?  I'm so cold after the
sermon.  And what does it matter, now you're here to protect me?"

The blood rose to his temples and he caught a fold of her cloak.
"Ellen--what is it?  You must tell me."

"Oh, presently--let's run a race first: my feet are freezing to the
ground," she cried; and gathering up the cloak she fled away across the
snow, the dog leaping about her with challenging barks.  For a moment
Archer stood watching, his gaze delighted by the flash of the red
meteor against the snow; then he started after her, and they met,
panting and laughing, at a wicket that led into the park.

She looked up at him and smiled.  "I knew you'd come!"

"That shows you wanted me to," he returned, with a disproportionate joy
in their nonsense.  The white glitter of the trees filled the air with
its own mysterious brightness, and as they walked on over the snow the
ground seemed to sing under their feet.

"Where did you come from?" Madame Olenska asked.

He told her, and added:  "It was because I got your note."

After a pause she said, with a just perceptible chill in her voice:
"May asked you to take care of me."

"I didn't need any asking."

"You mean--I'm so evidently helpless and defenceless?  What a poor
thing you must all think me!  But women here seem not--seem never to
feel the need: any more than the blessed in heaven."

He lowered his voice to ask:  "What sort of a need?"

"Ah, don't ask me!  I don't speak your language," she retorted
petulantly.

The answer smote him like a blow, and he stood still in the path,
looking down at her.

"What did I come for, if I don't speak yours?"

"Oh, my friend--!"  She laid her hand lightly on his arm, and he
pleaded earnestly:  "Ellen--why won't you tell me what's happened?"

She shrugged again.  "Does anything ever happen in heaven?"

He was silent, and they walked on a few yards without exchanging a
word.  Finally she said:  "I will tell you--but where, where, where?
One can't be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with
all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log
for the fire, or the newspaper!  Is there nowhere in an American house
where one may be by one's self?  You're so shy, and yet you're so
public.  I always feel as if I were in the convent again--or on the
stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds."

"Ah, you don't like us!" Archer exclaimed.

They were walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat
walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central
chimney.  The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed
windows Archer caught the light of a fire.

"Why--the house is open!" he said.

She stood still.  "No; only for today, at least.  I wanted to see it,
and Mr. van der Luyden had the fire lit and the windows opened, so that
we might stop there on the way back from church this morning."  She ran
up the steps and tried the door.  "It's still unlocked--what luck!
Come in and we can have a quiet talk.  Mrs. van der Luyden has driven
over to see her old aunts at Rhinebeck and we shan't be missed at the
house for another hour."

He followed her into the narrow passage.  His spirits, which had
dropped at her last words, rose with an irrational leap.  The homely
little house stood there, its panels and brasses shining in the
firelight, as if magically created to receive them.  A big bed of
embers still gleamed in the kitchen chimney, under an iron pot hung
from an ancient crane.  Rush-bottomed arm-chairs faced each other
across the tiled hearth, and rows of Delft plates stood on shelves
against the walls.  Archer stooped over and threw a log upon the embers.

Madame Olenska, dropping her cloak, sat down in one of the chairs.
Archer leaned against the chimney and looked at her.

"You're laughing now; but when you wrote me you were unhappy," he said.

"Yes."  She paused.  "But I can't feel unhappy when you're here."

"I sha'n't be here long," he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the
effort to say just so much and no more.

"No; I know.  But I'm improvident: I live in the moment when I'm happy."

The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses
to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black
tree-boles against the snow.  But it was as if she too had shifted her
place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping
over the fire with her indolent smile.  Archer's heart was beating
insubordinately.  What if it were from him that she had been running
away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone
together in this secret room?

"Ellen, if I'm really a help to you--if you really wanted me to
come--tell me what's wrong, tell me what it is you're running away
from," he insisted.

He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at
her: if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the
whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the
outer snow.

For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined
her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms
about his neck.  While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the
miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a
heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing
along the path to the house.  The man was Julius Beaufort.

"Ah--!" Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.

Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand
into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she
shrank back.

"So that was it?" Archer said derisively.

"I didn't know he was here," Madame Olenska murmured.  Her hand still
clung to Archer's; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the
passage threw open the door of the house.

"Hallo, Beaufort--this way!  Madame Olenska was expecting you," he said.

During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived
with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.

Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska,
had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly.  His way of
ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them,
if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of
nonexistence.  Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was
aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his
vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.

Beaufort had entered the little house with his usual easy assurance;
but he could not smile away the vertical line between his eyes.  It was
fairly clear that Madame Olenska had not known that he was coming,
though her words to Archer had hinted at the possibility; at any rate,
she had evidently not told him where she was going when she left New
York, and her unexplained departure had exasperated him.  The
ostensible reason of his appearance was the discovery, the very night
before, of a "perfect little house," not in the market, which was
really just the thing for her, but would be snapped up instantly if she
didn't take it; and he was loud in mock-reproaches for the dance she
had led him in running away just as he had found it.

"If only this new dodge for talking along a wire had been a little bit
nearer perfection I might have told you all this from town, and been
toasting my toes before the club fire at this minute, instead of
tramping after you through the snow," he grumbled, disguising a real
irritation under the pretence of it; and at this opening Madame Olenska
twisted the talk away to the fantastic possibility that they might one
day actually converse with each other from street to street, or
even--incredible dream!--from one town to another.  This struck from
all three allusions to Edgar Poe and Jules Verne, and such platitudes
as naturally rise to the lips of the most intelligent when they are
talking against time, and dealing with a new invention in which it
would seem ingenuous to believe too soon; and the question of the
telephone carried them safely back to the big house.

Mrs. van der Luyden had not yet returned; and Archer took his leave and
walked off to fetch the cutter, while Beaufort followed the Countess
Olenska indoors.  It was probable that, little as the van der Luydens
encouraged unannounced visits, he could count on being asked to dine,
and sent back to the station to catch the nine o'clock train; but more
than that he would certainly not get, for it would be inconceivable to
his hosts that a gentleman travelling without luggage should wish to
spend the night, and distasteful to them to propose it to a person with
whom they were on terms of such limited cordiality as Beaufort.

Beaufort knew all this, and must have foreseen it; and his taking the
long journey for so small a reward gave the measure of his impatience.
He was undeniably in pursuit of the Countess Olenska; and Beaufort had
only one object in view in his pursuit of pretty women.  His dull and
childless home had long since palled on him; and in addition to more
permanent consolations he was always in quest of amorous adventures in
his own set.  This was the man from whom Madame Olenska was avowedly
flying: the question was whether she had fled because his importunities
displeased her, or because she did not wholly trust herself to resist
them; unless, indeed, all her talk of flight had been a blind, and her
departure no more than a manoeuvre.

Archer did not really believe this.  Little as he had actually seen of
Madame Olenska, he was beginning to think that he could read her face,
and if not her face, her voice; and both had betrayed annoyance, and
even dismay, at Beaufort's sudden appearance.  But, after all, if this
were the case, was it not worse than if she had left New York for the
express purpose of meeting him?  If she had done that, she ceased to be
an object of interest, she threw in her lot with the vulgarest of
dissemblers: a woman engaged in a love affair with Beaufort "classed"
herself irretrievably.

No, it was worse a thousand times if, judging Beaufort, and probably
despising him, she was yet drawn to him by all that gave him an
advantage over the other men about her: his habit of two continents and
two societies, his familiar association with artists and actors and
people generally in the world's eye, and his careless contempt for
local prejudices.  Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was
purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native
shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and
socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the
Central Park.  How should any one coming from a wider world not feel
the difference and be attracted by it?

Madame Olenska, in a burst of irritation, had said to Archer that he
and she did not talk the same language; and the young man knew that in
some respects this was true.  But Beaufort understood every turn of her
dialect, and spoke it fluently: his view of life, his tone, his
attitude, were merely a coarser reflection of those revealed in Count
Olenski's letter.  This might seem to be to his disadvantage with Count
Olenski's wife; but Archer was too intelligent to think that a young
woman like Ellen Olenska would necessarily recoil from everything that
reminded her of her past.  She might believe herself wholly in revolt
against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even
though it were against her will.

Thus, with a painful impartiality, did the young man make out the case
for Beaufort, and for Beaufort's victim.  A longing to enlighten her
was strong in him; and there were moments when he imagined that all she
asked was to be enlightened.

That evening he unpacked his books from London.  The box was full of
things he had been waiting for impatiently; a new volume of Herbert
Spencer, another collection of the prolific Alphonse Daudet's brilliant
tales, and a novel called "Middlemarch," as to which there had lately
been interesting things said in the reviews.  He had declined three
dinner invitations in favour of this feast; but though he turned the
pages with the sensuous joy of the book-lover, he did not know what he
was reading, and one book after another dropped from his hand.
Suddenly, among them, he lit on a small volume of verse which he had
ordered because the name had attracted him:  "The House of Life."  He
took it up, and found himself plunged in an atmosphere unlike any he
had ever breathed in books; so warm, so rich, and yet so ineffably
tender, that it gave a new and haunting beauty to the most elementary
of human passions.  All through the night he pursued through those
enchanted pages the vision of a woman who had the face of Ellen
Olenska; but when he woke the next morning, and looked out at the
brownstone houses across the street, and thought of his desk in Mr.
Letterblair's office, and the family pew in Grace Church, his hour in
the park of Skuytercliff became as far outside the pale of probability
as the visions of the night.

"Mercy, how pale you look, Newland!" Janey commented over the
coffee-cups at breakfast; and his mother added:  "Newland, dear, I've
noticed lately that you've been coughing; I do hope you're not letting
yourself be overworked?"  For it was the conviction of both ladies
that, under the iron despotism of his senior partners, the young man's
life was spent in the most exhausting professional labours--and he had
never thought it necessary to undeceive them.

The next two or three days dragged by heavily.  The taste of the usual
was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as
if he were being buried alive under his future.  He heard nothing of
the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met
Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the
whist-tables.  It was not till the fourth evening that he found a note
awaiting him on his return home.  "Come late tomorrow: I must explain
to you.  Ellen."  These were the only words it contained.

The young man, who was dining out, thrust the note into his pocket,
smiling a little at the Frenchness of the "to you."  After dinner he
went to a play; and it was not until his return home, after midnight,
that he drew Madame Olenska's missive out again and re-read it slowly a
number of times.  There were several ways of answering it, and he gave
considerable thought to each one during the watches of an agitated
night.  That on which, when morning came, he finally decided was to
pitch some clothes into a portmanteau and jump on board a boat that was
leaving that very afternoon for St. Augustine.

A few nights later, Archer is at the theater watching a popular play. There is a scene that particularly moves him, in which two lovers part. The actress, turning her back to her wooer, does not see him steal over to kiss the velvet ribbon hanging down her back before he leaves the room for good. For reasons he cannot explain, this scene reminds Archer of the last time he left the Countess's flat. He concludes that it is perhaps Countess Olenska's mysterious ability to suggest a sense of tragedy that inspires him to compare her to the actress. Archer had left Ellen's flat convinced that Count Olenski's accusation of Ellen's affair was not unfounded. It had been painful for him to have to make her see that New York would not look favorably upon this lapse in morals. But now as he sees the Countess at the theater, she appears glad to have followed his advice not to sue for divorce. Archer is relieved that at least he is advising Ellen as May wished him to. As Archer leaves the theater he is greeted by his friend Ned Winsett, a bright and shabbily dressed young man. While as a journalist and failed author, Ned is certainly not wealthy or distinguished enough to be a part of Old New York society, his outlook on the world makes Archer reconsider the narrow values of his own life. On occasion, Ned has teased Archer that Old New York was going extinct and that it needs new blood and more active. Ned now inquires after Countess Olenska, who, it turns out, is his neighbor, and had kindly befriended his young son. Returning to his office the next morning, Archer is again struck by the monotony and futility of his job. As one of the few fields available to men of his class, the legal profession is still seen more as a gentlemanly pursuit than as a career. In a spare moment, Archer sends a note to Ellen asking if he may call on her. After three days, she responds. She writes that she has "run away" for the week to Skuytercliff, the Hudson mansion belonging to the van der Luydens. On a whim, Archer decides to accept the weekend invitation of his friends living along the Hudson, where he will be sure to run into the Countess. A day after arriving at his friends', Archer sets out for Skuytercliff, meeting Ellen along the way. As they walk, he asks her why she left New York so abruptly. She evades his questions temporarily by directing him towards the old van der Luyden cottage built by the family's first ancestors three hundred years earlier. Inside, Archer again questions her. As he waits, back turned, for her to respond, he imagines her coming toward him and throwing her arms around his neck. Before she can answer his question, Beaufort unexpectedly appears at the door. Ellen, visibly dismayed, bids him to enter, and Archer can see that it was Beaufort she was attempting to avoid. A few days later, Ellen sends Archer a note asking to see him so she can explain the events at Skuytercliff. Instead of responding, he packs his bags and leaves for St. Augustine, Florida, where May has been vacationing with her parents for the past week.

The scene at the theater between the actress and her lover, in which he kisses the ribbons on the back of her dress without her knowing, is part of a motif that occurs throughoutThe Age of Innocence. While watching the scene, Archer feels that it has a certain personal symbolic meaning for him, but he is unable to articulate exactly what it means. Because he does not consider Ellen as a lover, he concludes that the scene must have reminded him of Ellen's dramatic and vivacious personality. It is not until late in the book that we  come to realize that this scene is part of a larger pattern. At Newport, Archer sees Ellen standing near the shore with her back turned, yet leaves without her noticing. At the very end of the novel, Archer stands on the street below her Paris apartment, but leaves without seeing her. This theme of missed communication, or a failure to connect, serves to emphasize the fact that an affair between Archer and Ellen is fraught with difficulties, if it is not outrightly impossible. In addition to giving these scenes a poignant symbolism, Wharton also gives her characters symbolic meanings. In chapter 14, we meet Archer's friend Ned Winsett. While Ned is an interesting conversationalist and an insightful social critic, he is not a part of Archer's elite class. In fact, he is in many ways a failure; he was unable to make a career for himself as a man of letters  and now he works as a journalist. Archer values Ned's opinions on Old New York, yet he also finds Ned's life to be equally narrow and confining. Thus Ned serves as a reminder to Archer that there is no perfect alternative to the rigid social structure of high society. Ned symbolizes both the freedom from social confines and the tremendous costs of living outside the system. Setting also takes on increasing importance in these chapters. In rapidly changing the scene from New York to Skuytercliff to St. Augustine, Wharton indicates a change in her characters attitudes or temperaments. For Ellen, spending the weekend at Skuytercliff allows her to temporarily escape the dreary and confining realities of New York. She explains to Archer in her letter that she is "running away." Archer leaves New York for Hudson on a whim, with very little explanation, in order to see Ellen. Unsatisfied with their meeting, during which he both realizes his love for Ellen and the barriers to such a potential relationship, he abruptly departs for St. Augustine. There, he instead seeks to be reunited with May and affirm his own feelings for her. It is also significant that Archer's feelings for Ellen become explicit at Skuytercliff and not New York. In fact, many of the key interactions between them occur outside of New York. In this way, Archer connects his love for Ellen with an escape from the confines of New York. In Book Two he will express a wish to run away to the Far East with Ellen, or to at least go to a place where labels like "mistress" or "adultery" don't exist. To Archer, a voyage away from New York represents the ultimate freedom.