"Your cousin the Countess called on mother while you were away," Janey
Archer announced to her brother on the evening of his return.

The young man, who was dining alone with his mother and sister, glanced
up in surprise and saw Mrs. Archer's gaze demurely bent on her plate.
Mrs. Archer did not regard her seclusion from the world as a reason for
being forgotten by it; and Newland guessed that she was slightly
annoyed that he should be surprised by Madame Olenska's visit.

"She had on a black velvet polonaise with jet buttons, and a tiny green
monkey muff; I never saw her so stylishly dressed," Janey continued.
"She came alone, early on Sunday afternoon; luckily the fire was lit in
the drawing-room.  She had one of those new card-cases.  She said she
wanted to know us because you'd been so good to her."

Newland laughed.  "Madame Olenska always takes that tone about her
friends.  She's very happy at being among her own people again."

"Yes, so she told us," said Mrs. Archer.  "I must say she seems
thankful to be here."

"I hope you liked her, mother."

Mrs. Archer drew her lips together.  "She certainly lays herself out to
please, even when she is calling on an old lady."

"Mother doesn't think her simple," Janey interjected, her eyes screwed
upon her brother's face.

"It's just my old-fashioned feeling; dear May is my ideal," said Mrs.
Archer.

"Ah," said her son, "they're not alike."

Archer had left St. Augustine charged with many messages for old Mrs.
Mingott; and a day or two after his return to town he called on her.

The old lady received him with unusual warmth; she was grateful to him
for persuading the Countess Olenska to give up the idea of a divorce;
and when he told her that he had deserted the office without leave, and
rushed down to St. Augustine simply because he wanted to see May, she
gave an adipose chuckle and patted his knee with her puff-ball hand.

"Ah, ah--so you kicked over the traces, did you?  And I suppose Augusta
and Welland pulled long faces, and behaved as if the end of the world
had come?  But little May--she knew better, I'll be bound?"

"I hoped she did; but after all she wouldn't agree to what I'd gone
down to ask for."

"Wouldn't she indeed?  And what was that?"

"I wanted to get her to promise that we should be married in April.
What's the use of our wasting another year?"

Mrs. Manson Mingott screwed up her little mouth into a grimace of mimic
prudery and twinkled at him through malicious lids.  "'Ask Mamma,' I
suppose--the usual story.  Ah, these Mingotts--all alike!  Born in a
rut, and you can't root 'em out of it.  When I built this house you'd
have thought I was moving to California!  Nobody ever HAD built above
Fortieth Street--no, says I, nor above the Battery either, before
Christopher Columbus discovered America.  No, no; not one of them wants
to be different; they're as scared of it as the small-pox.  Ah, my dear
Mr. Archer, I thank my stars I'm nothing but a vulgar Spicer; but
there's not one of my own children that takes after me but my little
Ellen."  She broke off, still twinkling at him, and asked, with the
casual irrelevance of old age:  "Now, why in the world didn't you marry
my little Ellen?"

Archer laughed.  "For one thing, she wasn't there to be married."

"No--to be sure; more's the pity.  And now it's too late; her life is
finished."  She spoke with the cold-blooded complacency of the aged
throwing earth into the grave of young hopes.  The young man's heart
grew chill, and he said hurriedly:  "Can't I persuade you to use your
influence with the Wellands, Mrs. Mingott?  I wasn't made for long
engagements."

Old Catherine beamed on him approvingly.  "No; I can see that.  You've
got a quick eye.  When you were a little boy I've no doubt you liked to
be helped first." She threw back her head with a laugh that made her
chins ripple like little waves.  "Ah, here's my Ellen now!" she
exclaimed, as the portieres parted behind her.

Madame Olenska came forward with a smile.  Her face looked vivid and
happy, and she held out her hand gaily to Archer while she stooped to
her grandmother's kiss.

"I was just saying to him, my dear:  'Now, why didn't you marry my
little Ellen?'"

Madame Olenska looked at Archer, still smiling.  "And what did he
answer?"

"Oh, my darling, I leave you to find that out!  He's been down to
Florida to see his sweetheart."

"Yes, I know."  She still looked at him.  "I went to see your mother,
to ask where you'd gone.  I sent a note that you never answered, and I
was afraid you were ill."

He muttered something about leaving unexpectedly, in a great hurry, and
having intended to write to her from St. Augustine.

"And of course once you were there you never thought of me again!"  She
continued to beam on him with a gaiety that might have been a studied
assumption of indifference.

"If she still needs me, she's determined not to let me see it," he
thought, stung by her manner.  He wanted to thank her for having been
to see his mother, but under the ancestress's malicious eye he felt
himself tongue-tied and constrained.

"Look at him--in such hot haste to get married that he took French
leave and rushed down to implore the silly girl on his knees!  That's
something like a lover--that's the way handsome Bob Spicer carried off
my poor mother; and then got tired of her before I was weaned--though
they only had to wait eight months for me!  But there--you're not a
Spicer, young man; luckily for you and for May.  It's only my poor
Ellen that has kept any of their wicked blood; the rest of them are all
model Mingotts," cried the old lady scornfully.

Archer was aware that Madame Olenska, who had seated herself at her
grandmother's side, was still thoughtfully scrutinising him.  The
gaiety had faded from her eyes, and she said with great gentleness:
"Surely, Granny, we can persuade them between us to do as he wishes."

Archer rose to go, and as his hand met Madame Olenska's he felt that
she was waiting for him to make some allusion to her unanswered letter.

"When can I see you?" he asked, as she walked with him to the door of
the room.

"Whenever you like; but it must be soon if you want to see the little
house again.  I am moving next week."

A pang shot through him at the memory of his lamplit hours in the
low-studded drawing-room.  Few as they had been, they were thick with
memories.

"Tomorrow evening?"

She nodded.  "Tomorrow; yes; but early.  I'm going out."

The next day was a Sunday, and if she were "going out" on a Sunday
evening it could, of course, be only to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.  He
felt a slight movement of annoyance, not so much at her going there
(for he rather liked her going where she pleased in spite of the van
der Luydens), but because it was the kind of house at which she was
sure to meet Beaufort, where she must have known beforehand that she
would meet him--and where she was probably going for that purpose.

"Very well; tomorrow evening," he repeated, inwardly resolved that he
would not go early, and that by reaching her door late he would either
prevent her from going to Mrs. Struthers's, or else arrive after she
had started--which, all things considered, would no doubt be the
simplest solution.

It was only half-past eight, after all, when he rang the bell under the
wisteria; not as late as he had intended by half an hour--but a
singular restlessness had driven him to her door.  He reflected,
however, that Mrs. Struthers's Sunday evenings were not like a ball,
and that her guests, as if to minimise their delinquency, usually went
early.

The one thing he had not counted on, in entering Madame Olenska's hall,
was to find hats and overcoats there.  Why had she bidden him to come
early if she was having people to dine?  On a closer inspection of the
garments besides which Nastasia was laying his own, his resentment gave
way to curiosity.  The overcoats were in fact the very strangest he had
ever seen under a polite roof; and it took but a glance to assure
himself that neither of them belonged to Julius Beaufort.  One was a
shaggy yellow ulster of "reach-me-down" cut, the other a very old and
rusty cloak with a cape--something like what the French called a
"Macfarlane." This garment, which appeared to be made for a person of
prodigious size, had evidently seen long and hard wear, and its
greenish-black folds gave out a moist sawdusty smell suggestive of
prolonged sessions against bar-room walls.  On it lay a ragged grey
scarf and an odd felt hat of semiclerical shape.

Archer raised his eyebrows enquiringly at Nastasia, who raised hers in
return with a fatalistic "Gia!" as she threw open the drawing-room door.

The young man saw at once that his hostess was not in the room; then,
with surprise, he discovered another lady standing by the fire.  This
lady, who was long, lean and loosely put together, was clad in raiment
intricately looped and fringed, with plaids and stripes and bands of
plain colour disposed in a design to which the clue seemed missing.
Her hair, which had tried to turn white and only succeeded in fading,
was surmounted by a Spanish comb and black lace scarf, and silk
mittens, visibly darned, covered her rheumatic hands.

Beside her, in a cloud of cigar-smoke, stood the owners of the two
overcoats, both in morning clothes that they had evidently not taken
off since morning.  In one of the two, Archer, to his surprise,
recognised Ned Winsett; the other and older, who was unknown to him,
and whose gigantic frame declared him to be the wearer of the
"Macfarlane," had a feebly leonine head with crumpled grey hair, and
moved his arms with large pawing gestures, as though he were
distributing lay blessings to a kneeling multitude.

These three persons stood together on the hearth-rug, their eyes fixed
on an extraordinarily large bouquet of crimson roses, with a knot of
purple pansies at their base, that lay on the sofa where Madame Olenska
usually sat.

"What they must have cost at this season--though of course it's the
sentiment one cares about!" the lady was saying in a sighing staccato
as Archer came in.

The three turned with surprise at his appearance, and the lady,
advancing, held out her hand.

"Dear Mr. Archer--almost my cousin Newland!" she said.  "I am the
Marchioness Manson."

Archer bowed, and she continued:  "My Ellen has taken me in for a few
days.  I came from Cuba, where I have been spending the winter with
Spanish friends--such delightful distinguished people: the highest
nobility of old Castile--how I wish you could know them!  But I was
called away by our dear great friend here, Dr. Carver.  You don't know
Dr. Agathon Carver, founder of the Valley of Love Community?"

Dr. Carver inclined his leonine head, and the Marchioness continued:
"Ah, New York--New York--how little the life of the spirit has reached
it!  But I see you do know Mr. Winsett."

"Oh, yes--I reached him some time ago; but not by that route," Winsett
said with his dry smile.

The Marchioness shook her head reprovingly.  "How do you know, Mr.
Winsett?  The spirit bloweth where it listeth."

"List--oh, list!" interjected Dr. Carver in a stentorian murmur.

"But do sit down, Mr. Archer.  We four have been having a delightful
little dinner together, and my child has gone up to dress.  She expects
you; she will be down in a moment.  We were just admiring these
marvellous flowers, which will surprise her when she reappears."

Winsett remained on his feet.  "I'm afraid I must be off.  Please tell
Madame Olenska that we shall all feel lost when she abandons our
street.  This house has been an oasis."

"Ah, but she won't abandon YOU.  Poetry and art are the breath of life
to her.  It IS poetry you write, Mr. Winsett?"

"Well, no; but I sometimes read it," said Winsett, including the group
in a general nod and slipping out of the room.

"A caustic spirit--un peu sauvage.  But so witty; Dr. Carver, you DO
think him witty?"

"I never think of wit," said Dr. Carver severely.

"Ah--ah--you never think of wit!  How merciless he is to us weak
mortals, Mr. Archer!  But he lives only in the life of the spirit; and
tonight he is mentally preparing the lecture he is to deliver presently
at Mrs. Blenker's.  Dr. Carver, would there be time, before you start
for the Blenkers' to explain to Mr. Archer your illuminating discovery
of the Direct Contact?  But no; I see it is nearly nine o'clock, and we
have no right to detain you while so many are waiting for your message."

Dr. Carver looked slightly disappointed at this conclusion, but, having
compared his ponderous gold time-piece with Madame Olenska's little
travelling-clock, he reluctantly gathered up his mighty limbs for
departure.

"I shall see you later, dear friend?" he suggested to the Marchioness,
who replied with a smile:  "As soon as Ellen's carriage comes I will
join you; I do hope the lecture won't have begun."

Dr. Carver looked thoughtfully at Archer.  "Perhaps, if this young
gentleman is interested in my experiences, Mrs. Blenker might allow you
to bring him with you?"

"Oh, dear friend, if it were possible--I am sure she would be too
happy.  But I fear my Ellen counts on Mr. Archer herself."

"That," said Dr. Carver, "is unfortunate--but here is my card."  He
handed it to Archer, who read on it, in Gothic characters:

  +---------------------------+
  |      Agathon Carver       |
  |    The Valley of Love     |
  |   Kittasquattamy, N. Y.   |
  +---------------------------+

Dr. Carver bowed himself out, and Mrs. Manson, with a sigh that might
have been either of regret or relief, again waved Archer to a seat.

"Ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, I am so glad of
this quiet moment with you."

Archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the Marchioness
continued, in her low sighing accents: "I know everything, dear Mr.
Archer--my child has told me all you have done for her.  Your wise
advice: your courageous firmness--thank heaven it was not too late!"

The young man listened with considerable embarrassment.  Was there any
one, he wondered, to whom Madame Olenska had not proclaimed his
intervention in her private affairs?

"Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave her a legal opinion, as she
asked me to."

"Ah, but in doing it--in doing it you were the unconscious instrument
of--of--what word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?" cried
the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids
mysteriously.  "Little did you know that at that very moment I was
being appealed to: being approached, in fact--from the other side of
the Atlantic!"

She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard,
and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her
lips, breathed behind it:  "By the Count himself--my poor, mad, foolish
Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms."

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed, springing up.

"You are horrified?  Yes, of course; I understand.  I don't defend poor
Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend.  He does not
defend himself--he casts himself at her feet: in my person."  She
tapped her emaciated bosom.  "I have his letter here."

"A letter?--Has Madame Olenska seen it?" Archer stammered, his brain
whirling with the shock of the announcement.

The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly.  "Time--time; I must have
time.  I know my Ellen--haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade
unforgiving?"

"But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that
hell--"

"Ah, yes," the Marchioness acquiesced.  "So she describes it--my
sensitive child!  But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may
stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up?
Those roses there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the
open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice!  Jewels--historic
pearls: the Sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing for all
these!  Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I
always have; and those also surrounded her.  Pictures, priceless
furniture, music, brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear young man,
if you'll excuse me, is what you've no conception of here!  And she had
it all; and the homage of the greatest.  She tells me she is not
thought handsome in New York--good heavens!  Her portrait has been
painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the
privilege.  Are these things nothing?  And the remorse of an adoring
husband?"

As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an
expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer's
mirth had he not been numb with amazement.

He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first
sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger
of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him
to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just
escaped.

"She knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly.

Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips.  "Nothing directly--but
does she suspect?  Who can tell?  The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been
waiting to see you.  From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had
taken, and of your influence over her, I hoped it might be possible to
count on your support--to convince you ..."

"That she ought to go back?  I would rather see her dead!" cried the
young man violently.

"Ah," the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment.  For a
while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory
fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and
listened.

"Here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to
the bouquet on the sofa:  "Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr.
Archer?  After all, marriage is marriage ... and my niece is still a
wife..."

While Newland had been away, Ellen had stopped by to meet his mother and sister. Mrs. Archer does not think she is as plain as she first appears. Indeed, Newland remarks that she is quite different than May. Newland goes to visit Mrs. Catherine Manson Mingott when he returns because he has so many messages for her. Mingott jokes, "Why don1t you marry Ellen. Newland remarks that she had not been around. Newland reveals to Ellen and Manson Mingott that he wanted to convince May to marry him sooner. Ellen suggests that perhaps she and her grandmother can be of assistance. Ellen asks Newland to visit her and he does the next day. When he arrives at her home, Newland is greeted by a cast of strange people. There is his friend Ned, who leaves at first opportunity. There is a hokey Dr. Carver, who leaves to attend a lecture. And, there is the Marchioness Mingott, Ellen1s aunt. She tells Newland that she has come on Count Olenski1s behalf to convince Ellen to return to Europe.

We must notice the constant questioning, "Why isn1t Newland marrying Ellen. There seems to be an unconscious realization among people that they are right for each other. What do they seem to have in common to Catherine. Many academics site Dr. Carver as a very important character. His religion of love is a hoax and exists in opposition to the other religion, that of the strict moral conduct of the society members. His religion is clearly a sham; but interestingly very few regard the religious conduct of the society as being a sham, although both have very little basis in reality

When Archer returns to New York City his sister tells him that Countess Olenska called on his mother while he was away. A couple of days later Archer heads over to Mrs. Manson Mingott's. He asks her to convince the Wellands to let Archer marry May sooner rather than later. While he is talking to Mrs. Mingott, Madame Olenska enters. She asks Mrs. Mingott to help Archer convince the Wellands to let him marry May posthaste. As Archer leaves, he and Madame Olenska make plans to meet the next night. The next night, around half-past eight, Archer arrives at Madame Olenska's. She's not in her drawing room. Instead, he sees his friend Ned Winsett, Marchioness Manson, and Dr. Agathon Carver, a spiritualist . Archer is not impressed with Dr. Carver. They admire the roses and pansies sent by Julius Beaufort. After Winsett and Dr. Carver leave, the Marchioness informs Archer that the Count has written, pleading for Madame Olenska to return to him. The Marchioness asks Archer for his help. Archer refuses.


"What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?" Madame Olenska cried
as she came into the room.

She was dressed as if for a ball.  Everything about her shimmered and
glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams;
and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a
roomful of rivals.

"We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise
you with," Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly
to the flowers.

Madame Olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet.  Her colour did
not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like
summer lightning.  "Ah," she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the
young man had never heard, "who is ridiculous enough to send me a
bouquet?  Why a bouquet?  And why tonight of all nights?  I am not
going to a ball; I am not a girl engaged to be married.  But some
people are always ridiculous."

She turned back to the door, opened it, and called out:  "Nastasia!"

The ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and Archer heard Madame
Olenska say, in an Italian that she seemed to pronounce with
intentional deliberateness in order that he might follow it:
"Here--throw this into the dustbin!" and then, as Nastasia stared
protestingly:  "But no--it's not the fault of the poor flowers.  Tell
the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of Mr.
Winsett, the dark gentleman who dined here.  His wife is ill--they may
give her pleasure ... The boy is out, you say?  Then, my dear one, run
yourself; here, put my cloak over you and fly.  I want the thing out of
the house immediately!  And, as you live, don't say they come from me!"

She flung her velvet opera cloak over the maid's shoulders and turned
back into the drawing-room, shutting the door sharply.  Her bosom was
rising high under its lace, and for a moment Archer thought she was
about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the
Marchioness to Archer, asked abruptly: "And you two--have you made
friends!"

"It's for Mr. Archer to say, darling; he has waited patiently while you
were dressing."

"Yes--I gave you time enough: my hair wouldn't go," Madame Olenska
said, raising her hand to the heaped-up curls of her chignon.  "But
that reminds me: I see Dr. Carver is gone, and you'll be late at the
Blenkers'.  Mr. Archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?"

She followed the Marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a
miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from
the doorstep:  "Mind, the carriage is to be back for me at ten!"  Then
she returned to the drawing-room, where Archer, on re-entering it,
found her standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror.
It was not usual, in New York society, for a lady to address her
parlour-maid as "my dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped in
her own opera-cloak; and Archer, through all his deeper feelings,
tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action
followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.

Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a
second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself
into her sofa-corner, and sighed out:  "There's time for a cigarette."

He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed
up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said:  "What
do you think of me in a temper?"

Archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution:  "It
makes me understand what your aunt has been saying about you."

"I knew she'd been talking about me.  Well?"

"She said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and
amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here."

Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

"Medora is incorrigibly romantic.  It has made up to her for so many
things!"

Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk.  "Is your aunt's
romanticism always consistent with accuracy?"

"You mean: does she speak the truth?"  Her niece considered.  "Well,
I'll tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true
and something untrue.  But why do you ask?  What has she been telling
you?"

He looked away into the fire, and then back at her shining presence.
His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening
by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry
her away.

"She says--she pretends that Count Olenski has asked her to persuade
you to go back to him."

Madame Olenska made no answer.  She sat motionless, holding her
cigarette in her half-lifted hand.  The expression of her face had not
changed; and Archer remembered that he had before noticed her apparent
incapacity for surprise.

"You knew, then?" he broke out.

She was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette.
She brushed it to the floor.  "She has hinted about a letter: poor
darling!  Medora's hints--"

"Is it at your husband's request that she has arrived here suddenly?"

Madame Olenska seemed to consider this question also.  "There again:
one can't tell.  She told me she had had a 'spiritual summons,'
whatever that is, from Dr. Carver.  I'm afraid she's going to marry Dr.
Carver ...  poor Medora, there's always some one she wants to marry.
But perhaps the people in Cuba just got tired of her!  I think she was
with them as a sort of paid companion.  Really, I don't know why she
came."

"But you do believe she has a letter from your husband?"

Again Madame Olenska brooded silently; then she said:  "After all, it
was to be expected."

The young man rose and went to lean against the fireplace.  A sudden
restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that
their minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the
wheels of the returning carriage.

"You know that your aunt believes you will go back?"

Madame Olenska raised her head quickly.  A deep blush rose to her face
and spread over her neck and shoulders.  She blushed seldom and
painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn.

"Many cruel things have been believed of me," she said.

"Oh, Ellen--forgive me; I'm a fool and a brute!"

She smiled a little.  "You are horribly nervous; you have your own
troubles.  I know you think the Wellands are unreasonable about your
marriage, and of course I agree with you.  In Europe people don't
understand our long American engagements; I suppose they are not as
calm as we are."  She pronounced the "we" with a faint emphasis that
gave it an ironic sound.

Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up.  After all, she
had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs,
and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that
all he could do was to follow her lead.  But the sense of the waning
hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier
of words should drop between them again.

"Yes," he said abruptly; "I went south to ask May to marry me after
Easter.  There's no reason why we shouldn't be married then."

"And May adores you--and yet you couldn't convince her?  I thought her
too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions."

"She IS too intelligent--she's not their slave."

Madame Olenska looked at him.  "Well, then--I don't understand."

Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush.  "We had a frank
talk--almost the first.  She thinks my impatience a bad sign."

"Merciful heavens--a bad sign?"

"She thinks it means that I can't trust myself to go on caring for her.
She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from some
one that I--care for more."

Madame Olenska examined this curiously.  "But if she thinks that--why
isn't she in a hurry too?"

"Because she's not like that: she's so much nobler.  She insists all
the more on the long engagement, to give me time--"

"Time to give her up for the other woman?"

"If I want to."

Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed
eyes.  Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her
horses.

"That IS noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice.

"Yes.  But it's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous?  Because you don't care for any one else?"

"Because I don't mean to marry any one else."

"Ah."  There was another long interval.  At length she looked up at him
and asked:  "This other woman--does she love you?"

"Oh, there's no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking
of is--was never--"

"Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?"

"There's your carriage," said Archer.

She half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes.  Her fan and
gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically.

"Yes; I suppose I must be going."

"You're going to Mrs. Struthers's?"

"Yes."  She smiled and added:  "I must go where I am invited, or I
should be too lonely.  Why not come with me?"

Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her
give him the rest of her evening.  Ignoring her question, he continued
to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which
she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power
to make her drop them.

"May guessed the truth," he said.  "There is another woman--but not the
one she thinks."

Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move.  After a moment he sat
down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the
gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other
side of the hearth.  "Ah, don't make love to me!  Too many people have
done that," she said, frowning.

Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she
could have given him.  "I have never made love to you," he said, "and I
never shall.  But you are the woman I would have married if it had been
possible for either of us."

"Possible for either of us?"  She looked at him with unfeigned
astonishment.  "And you say that--when it's you who've made it
impossible?"

He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow
of light tore its blinding way.

"I'VE made it impossible--?"

"You, you, YOU!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the
verge of tears.  "Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it
up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must
sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ... and to
spare one's family the publicity, the scandal?  And because my family
was going to be your family--for May's sake and for yours--I did what
you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do.  Ah," she broke
out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for
you!"

She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of
her dress like a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the
fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving.

"Good God," he groaned.  "When I thought--"

"You thought?"

"Ah, don't ask me what I thought!"

Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck
to her face.  She sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity.

"I do ask you."

"Well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read--"

"My husband's letter?"

"Yes."

"I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing!  All I
feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and May."

"Good God," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.

The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final
and irrevocable.  It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his
own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever
lift that load from his heart.  He did not move from his place, or
raise his head from his hands; his hidden eyeballs went on staring into
utter darkness.

"At least I loved you--" he brought out.

On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed
that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a
child's.  He started up and came to her side.

"Ellen!  What madness!  Why are you crying?  Nothing's done that can't
be undone.  I'm still free, and you're going to be."  He had her in his
arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain
terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise.  The one thing that
astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes
arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her
made everything so simple.

She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her
stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up.

"Ah, my poor Newland--I suppose this had to be.  But it doesn't in the
least alter things," she said, looking down at him in her turn from the
hearth.

"It alters the whole of life for me."

"No, no--it mustn't, it can't.  You're engaged to May Welland; and I'm
married."

He stood up too, flushed and resolute.  "Nonsense!  It's too late for
that sort of thing.  We've no right to lie to other people or to
ourselves.  We won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying
May after this?"

She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her
profile reflected in the glass behind her.  One of the locks of her
chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard
and almost old.

"I don't see you," she said at length, "putting that question to May.
Do you?"

He gave a reckless shrug.  "It's too late to do anything else."

"You say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not
because it's true.  In reality it's too late to do anything but what
we'd both decided on."

"Ah, I don't understand you!"

She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing
it.  "You don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've
changed things for me: oh, from the first--long before I knew all you'd
done."

"All I'd done?"

"Yes.  I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy
of me--that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person.  It seems
they had even refused to meet me at dinner.  I found that out
afterward; and how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der
Luydens'; and how you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the
Beaufort ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead
of one--"

At that he broke into a laugh.

"Just imagine," she said, "how stupid and unobservant I was!  I knew
nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day.  New York
simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home.  And I was so
happy at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and
good, and glad to see me.  But from the very beginning," she continued,
"I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons
that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard
and--unnecessary.  The very good people didn't convince me; I felt
they'd never been tempted.  But you knew; you understood; you had felt
the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you
hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by
disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.  That was what I'd never known
before--and it's better than anything I've known."

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and
each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning
lead.  He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the
hearthrug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her
dress.  Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.

She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at
him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.

"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried.  "I can't go back
now to that other way of thinking.  I can't love you unless I give you
up."

His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained
facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created.
Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.

"And Beaufort?  Is he to replace me?"

As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of
anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own.  But Madame
Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down
before her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she
pondered a question.

"He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers's; why don't you go to
him?" Archer sneered.

She turned to ring the bell.  "I shall not go out this evening; tell
the carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa," she said when the
maid came.

After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with
bitter eyes.  "Why this sacrifice?  Since you tell me that you're
lonely I've no right to keep you from your friends."

She smiled a little under her wet lashes.  "I shan't be lonely now.  I
WAS lonely; I WAS afraid.  But the emptiness and the darkness are gone;
when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a
room where there's always a light."

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility,
and Archer groaned out again:  "I don't understand you!"

"Yet you understand May!"

He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her.  "May is ready
to give me up."

"What!  Three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten
your marriage?"

"She's refused; that gives me the right--"

"Ah, you've taught me what an ugly word that is," she said.

He turned away with a sense of utter weariness.  He felt as though he
had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and
now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way
and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.

If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her
arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something
inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense
of her sincerity.  At length he began to plead again.

"If we do this now it will be worse afterward--worse for every one--"

"No--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.

At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house.  They had
heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless,
looking at each other with startled eyes.

Outside, Nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a
moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the
Countess Olenska.

"The lady was very happy at the flowers," Nastasia said, smoothing her
apron.  "She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and
she cried a little and said it was a folly."

Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope.  She tore it open and
carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she
handed the telegram to Archer.

It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska.
In it he read:  "Granny's telegram successful.  Papa and Mamma agree
marriage after Easter.  Am telegraphing Newland.  Am too happy for
words and love you dearly.  Your grateful May."

Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a
similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and
letters.  The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland,
and ran as follows:  "Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at
twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love
May."

Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate
the news it contained.  Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and
turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what
he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the
stairs.

A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which
served Janey as a dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped
impatiently on the panel.  The door opened, and his sister stood before
him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown, with her hair "on
pins."  Her face looked pale and apprehensive.

"Newland!  I hope there's no bad news in that telegram?  I waited on
purpose, in case--"  (No item of his correspondence was safe from
Janey.)

He took no notice of her question.  "Look here--what day is Easter this
year?"

She looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance.  "Easter?  Newland!
Why, of course, the first week in April.  Why?"

"The first week?"  He turned again to the pages of his diary,
calculating rapidly under his breath.  "The first week, did you say?"
He threw back his head with a long laugh.

"For mercy's sake what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter, except that I'm going to be married in a month."

Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast.
"Oh Newland, how wonderful!  I'm so glad!  But, dearest, why do you
keep on laughing?  Do hush, or you'll wake Mamma."

Book II

Ellen comes down the stairs. She sees that someone has brought her a bouquet and she is annoyed, "I1m not engaged to be married," and asks Nastasia to take the bouquet to Ned1s wife. Newland puts the Marchioness Mingott in her carriage. After she is gone, Ellen and Newland smoke. Newland reveals Mingott1s belief that Ellen will return to Europe. Ellen blushes and says, "Many cruel things have been believed of me. Then after some conversation, Newland reveals that he is in love with Ellen. Ellen is angry because it is Newland that has made it impossible for them to marry; he convinced her not to divorce. Newland says that it is his right to renege on the marriage since May refused to marry him early. But just as he says this, a telegram arrives informing Ellen that her help has made it possible for the two to marry just after Easter one month away.

The first point of interest in this chapter is a bit of dialogue between Newland and Ellen. Newland asks, "Is your aunt1s romanticism always consistent with accuracy. And Ellen says, "You mean: does she speak the truth. It is interesting that Newland believes the language of his society to be straightforward and honest, but it is clear that in reality the New Yorkers speak in twisted circumlocutions. Ellen, is the only one who speaks in plain honest language. Also interesting is the line by Newland, "I1m still free and you1re going to be. He vows to call off the engagement but loses all heart when he receives the telegram from May. If his freedom is so easily retracted, is he ever free. In fact, Ellen notes that she only chose against divorce because it seemed to be what Newland wanted. Newland seems to be imposing his shackles on others, rather than liberating them

Madame Olenska joins the Marchioness and Archer in the drawing room. She sees Beaufort's bouquet and asks her maid to send them to Ned Winsett's wife. After the Marchioness leaves, Madame Olenska and Archer are finally alone. After they chat about May, Archer reveals to Madame Olenska that May has asked whether there is a married woman in his life. He confesses that there is, and that it's her: Madame Olenska. Madame Olenska rejects his advances. She's married, and she has stayed married, because he'sthe one who convinced her that divorce is a bad. Their conversation ends when the maid enters with a telegram. It's a telegram from May announcing that the Wellands have agreed to an early marriage. Bummer. When Archer returns home, he has received the same telegram from May, informing him that her parents have agreed to a wedding the Tuesday after Easter. His sister tells him that the wedding date is the first week in April. Archer laughs.


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 brougham 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 bridesmaids 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 rite 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 bridesmaids' 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 sat 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 Luyden 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 grey
waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its place; then,
resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey 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, recognising all the
same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the
Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry 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 Chivers 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 van der Luyden's arm, sat
weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's
ermine muff.

"Poor Janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her
head around she can see only the people in the few front pews; and
they're mostly dowdy Newlands and Dagonets."

On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved
for the families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising 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
Lefferts'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 Lefferts'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
mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever
understood.  A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents
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. Welland's
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-stable keeper (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. Welland 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
curbstone.  The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the
bride to the mob of dressmakers 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 shudder.  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 Wellands' 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 colour 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 Parma violets, formed the happiest
contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum-colour.  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 Marchioness Manson was still in
Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her
niece, Madame Olenska.  It was generally understood that their abrupt
departure was due to Madame 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
circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for
the wedding.  For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora'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 manoeuvre,
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 half way up the nave, the
Bishop, the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about
the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr 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 nearer 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 these 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
bridesmaids 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 had 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 she 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 beckoning to
them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with
big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the
far end of the canvas tunnel.

The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped
May's white cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brougham at her
side.  She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands
clasped under her veil.

"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 horror 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 Mingott stairs between
laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham
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 bookstall 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 du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal
of the bridal couple, with a 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 grownup
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 Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion 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 will 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
Beauforts 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 Luydens--they've sent their man
over from Skuytercliff 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 Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.  It
happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this
morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's
house ready.  It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir;
and the Miss du Lacs 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 Luyden 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 Luydens
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 could 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:  "Ah, it's just our luck
beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"

May and Newland are married and they spend their honeymoon, due to a twist of fate, at the Patroon home. Ellen, "due to illness", could not attend the wedding; she had been away for four weeks with her aunt.

Here, in this chapter, May1s "godliness" is again made apparent: "Her face had the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chose to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. Clothing is an important symbol throughout the novel; interestingly, Ellen gives May a gift of old lace. The gift seems ironic since it is Ellen who supposedly defies conventionalities; yet, old lace is the mark of old society, old convention. Lace is also like nettingperhaps Ellen is acknowledging that May has "netted" her beau. Lace is also simultaneously romantic and sexual while being old fashioned and sophisticated. The introductory credits to the Scorcese film, The Age of Innocence , shows lace superimposed over very erotic flowers. Clearly, the gift of lace has some interesting implications

It's wedding time. Newland stands at the altar, waiting for his bride, worried that he might have forgotten the wedding ring. It's in his pocket. During the entire ceremony, Newland is in a daze. But he manages to appear cheerful. After the wedding, Newland and May climb into a carriage. May surprises Newland by embracing him in public. Gasp. They head over to the wedding breakfast, which is being held at Mrs. Manson Mingott's house. After the breakfast, they head off for their honeymoon in Rhinebeck. When they arrive in Rhinebeck, the coachman tells them that Miss du Lacs's house is unavailable because of a leak in the water tank. He takes them to the van der Luydens' home at Skuytercliff instead. May is thrilled with the change in plans. Of course, Archer is stunned because he associates Skuytercliff with meeting with Madame Olenska there.


"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," 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 one's self 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
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at
Botzen 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 Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle again.  Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would
have been more "undignified" than to force one's self 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 Botzen.  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
Bunsen 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 Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged 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 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.

"Wear, 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 Englishwomen 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 Harle 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 girl friends, 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 Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which
some one 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 cafes chantants
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," 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 untrammelled 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 a 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 mould 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 friends'
hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always
travelled as a sight-seer 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 Europeanised 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 had 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 appeared to feel the need
of retailing to every one 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
St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had
said:  "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited 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.

"Probably 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 hansom so spotlessly splendid in her
sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown 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 right 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 shawled 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 the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, 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 Carfry 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
Leman.  Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who
had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he
went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. 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 follow the same career; but an
insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into 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, been advised by
Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's
house.  He had obviously always been 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 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
secretaryship.  There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a
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 to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge.  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 Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of
ideas the only one worth living!  He continued to stare at M.  Riviere
perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities 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 M. Riviere's sallow skin.  "I--I thought it
your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he
rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of
having asked a favour, he went on hastily:  "One throws out random
suggestions--more to one's self than to others.  In reality, I see no
immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a
trace of constraint:  "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be
taking you upstairs."

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.  His
hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first
impulse had been to invite him to dine 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 hansom.

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he 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 snobbishness, 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 Carfrys 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 school-room.  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 had 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 Carfrys' tutor?"

"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, 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 fancied that
she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."

"A job in New York?  What sort of a 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, how 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 M. Riviere.  Another
after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of
New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit
M. 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
hansom 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 have pretty
nearly finished 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.

On the honeymoon, Newland realizes that there isn1t much to emancipate in May because she is totally unaware that she may not be free. They visit some boring family friends, the Carfry1s, and enjoy making fun of them on the way home.

This chapter is quite dull and is probably intentionally written this way to show how commonplace their honeymoon is. The only important idea is "The first six months of marriage are always the hardest. After that I suppose we shall have finished rubbing off each other1s angles. But the worst of it was that May1s pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep

It is nearing fall and the end of Archer and May's three-month honeymoon in Europe. They spent most of their time in Switzerland and France. May ordered a lot of dresses in Paris. Now they're in London, where Archer orders his clothes. They head over to the Carfrys', who are friends of Newland's mother's. At the Carfrys', Archer meets Monsieur Riviere, who tutored the Carfrys' nephew. Archer enjoys talking literature with Monsieur Riviere, who is a failed writer. May thinks Monsieur Riviere is ridiculous.