Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner
calls, though derided in Archer's set, still generally prevailed.  As
the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place, the long
thoroughfare was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before
the Reggie Chiverses' (where there was a dinner for the Duke), and the
occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler
ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall.
Thus, as Archer crossed Washington Square, he remarked that old Mr. du
Lac was calling on his cousins the Dagonets, and turning down the
corner of West Tenth Street he saw Mr. Skipworth, of his own firm,
obviously bound on a visit to the Miss Lannings.  A little farther up
Fifth Avenue, Beaufort appeared on his doorstep, darkly projected
against a blaze of light, descended to his private brougham, and rolled
away to a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination.  It was
not an Opera night, and no one was giving a party, so that Beaufort's
outing was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature.  Archer connected it in
his mind with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in which
beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared, and
before whose newly painted door the canary-coloured brougham of Miss
Fanny Ring was frequently seen to wait.

Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's
world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians
and "people who wrote."  These scattered fragments of humanity had
never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure.  In
spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite
respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves.  Medora Manson,
in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had
soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of
Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who
imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,
and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the
magazine editors and musical and literary critics.

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these
persons.  They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one
didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds.
Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs.
Archer was always at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable
and cultivated society had been when it included such figures as
Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit
Fay." The most celebrated authors of that generation had been
"gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had
gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair,
their intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York
criterion inapplicable to them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody
between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had
carriages.  It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't
tell, and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and
almost parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have
bridged the abyss; but she had never opened a book or looked at a
picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala
nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.
Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in
bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged
footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability.  Moreover, he was as
illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as
the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough
to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could
remember, and had accepted them as part of the structure of his
universe.  He knew that there were societies where painters and poets
and novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were as sought
after as Dukes; he had often pictured to himself what it would have
been to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of
Merimee (whose "Lettres a une Inconnue" was one of his inseparables),
of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris.  But such things were
inconceivable in New York, and unsettling to think of.  Archer knew
most of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he met
them at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that
were beginning to come into existence.  He enjoyed them there, and was
bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid
and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and
even after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away
with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that
the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where
they would naturally merge.

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the
Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted
mysterious joys.  He remembered with what amusement she had told him
that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in
a "Bohemian" quarter given over to "people who wrote."  It was not the
peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped
her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising.

She herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her
drawing-room (a part of the house in which books were usually supposed
to be "out of place"), though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted
Archer's interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,
Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers.  Ruminating on these things as he
approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in
which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into
conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be
of use in her present difficulty.

Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously.  On the bench in the
hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk with a
gold J. B. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no
mistaking the fact that these costly articles were the property of
Julius Beaufort.

Archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his
card and going away; then he remembered that in writing to Madame
Olenska he had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that he
wished to see her privately.  He had therefore no one but himself to
blame if she had opened her doors to other visitors; and he entered the
drawing-room with the dogged determination to make Beaufort feel
himself in the way, and to outstay him.

The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped with
an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church
candles of yellowish wax.  He had thrust his chest out, supporting his
shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on one large
patent-leather foot.  As Archer entered he was smiling and looking down
on his hostess, who sat on a sofa placed at right angles to the
chimney.  A table banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and
against the orchids and azaleas which the young man recognised as
tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses, Madame Olenska sat
half-reclined, her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving
the arm bare to the elbow.

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were
called "simple dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-boned
silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the
crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to
show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band.  But Madame Olenska,
heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet
bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur.
Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the
new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the
Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with
her chin nestling in fur.  There was something perverse and provocative
in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and
in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect
was undeniably pleasing.

"Lord love us--three whole days at Skuytercliff!" Beaufort was saying
in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered.  "You'd better take all
your furs, and a hot-water-bottle."

"Why?  Is the house so cold?" she asked, holding out her left hand to
Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss
it.

"No; but the missus is," said Beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young
man.

"But I thought her so kind.  She came herself to invite me. Granny says
I must certainly go."

"Granny would, of course.  And I say it's a shame you're going to miss
the little oyster supper I'd planned for you at Delmonico's next
Sunday, with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people."

She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.

"Ah--that does tempt me!  Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers's
I've not met a single artist since I've been here."

"What kind of artists?  I know one or two painters, very good fellows,
that I could bring to see you if you'd allow me," said Archer boldly.

"Painters?  Are there painters in New York?" asked Beaufort, in a tone
implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures;
and Madame Olenska said to Archer, with her grave smile:  "That would
be charming.  But I was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers,
actors, musicians.  My husband's house was always full of them."

She said the words "my husband" as if no sinister associations were
connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the
lost delights of her married life.  Archer looked at her perplexedly,
wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to
touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her
reputation in order to break with it.

"I do think," she went on, addressing both men, "that the imprevu adds
to one's enjoyment.  It's perhaps a mistake to see the same people
every day."

"It's confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness,"
Beaufort grumbled.  "And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back
on me.  Come--think better of it!  Sunday is your last chance, for
Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I've a
private room, and a Steinway, and they'll sing all night for me."

"How delicious!  May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow
morning?"

She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice.
Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood
staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes.

"Why not now?"

"It's too serious a question to decide at this late hour."

"Do you call it late?"

She returned his glance coolly.  "Yes; because I have still to talk
business with Mr. Archer for a little while."

"Ah," Beaufort snapped.  There was no appeal from her tone, and with a
slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed
with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold:  "I say,
Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop in town of course
you're included in the supper," left the room with his heavy important
step.

For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of
his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his
mind.

"You know painters, then?  You live in their milieu?" she asked, her
eyes full of interest.

"Oh, not exactly.  I don't know that the arts have a milieu here, any
of them; they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt."

"But you care for such things?"

"Immensely.  When I'm in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition.  I
try to keep up."

She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from
her long draperies.

"I used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things.  But
now I want to try not to."

"You want to try not to?"

"Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody
else here."

Archer reddened.  "You'll never be like everybody else," he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little.  "Ah, don't say that.  If
you knew how I hate to be different!"

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask.  She leaned forward,
clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into
remote dark distances.

"I want to get away from it all," she insisted.

He waited a moment and cleared his throat.  "I know.  Mr. Letterblair
has told me."

"Ah?"

"That's the reason I've come.  He asked me to--you see I'm in the firm."

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened.  "You mean
you can manage it for me?  I can talk to you instead of Mr.
Letterblair?  Oh, that will be so much easier!"

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his
self-satisfaction.  He perceived that she had spoken of business to
Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed Beaufort was
something of a triumph.

"I am here to talk about it," he repeated.

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the
back of the sofa.  Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed
by the rich red of her dress.  She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a
pathetic and even pitiful figure.

"Now we're coming to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself of
the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his
mother and her contemporaries.  How little practice he had had in
dealing with unusual situations!  Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar
to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage.  In face of what
was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence:  "I
want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past."

"I understand that."

Her face warmed.  "Then you'll help me?"

"First--" he hesitated--"perhaps I ought to know a little more."

She seemed surprised.  "You know about my husband--my life with him?"

He made a sign of assent.

"Well--then--what more is there?  In this country are such things
tolerated?  I'm a Protestant--our church does not forbid divorce in
such cases."

"Certainly not."

They were both silent again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count
Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them.  The letter filled
only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in
speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry
blackguard.  But how much truth was behind it?  Only Count Olenski's
wife could tell.

"I've looked through the papers you gave to Mr. Letterblair," he said
at length.

"Well--can there be anything more abominable?"

"No."

She changed her position slightly, screening her eyes with her lifted
hand.

"Of course you know," Archer continued, "that if your husband chooses
to fight the case--as he threatens to--"

"Yes--?"

"He can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable to
you: say them publicly, so that they would get about, and harm you even
if--"

"If--?"

"I mean: no matter how unfounded they were."

She paused for a long interval; so long that, not wishing to keep his
eyes on her shaded face, he had time to imprint on his mind the exact
shape of her other hand, the one on her knee, and every detail of the
three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which, he noticed, a
wedding ring did not appear.

"What harm could such accusations, even if he made them publicly, do me
here?"

It was on his lips to exclaim:  "My poor child--far more harm than
anywhere else!"  Instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his
ears like Mr. Letterblair's: "New York society is a very small world
compared with the one you've lived in.  And it's ruled, in spite of
appearances, by a few people with--well, rather old-fashioned ideas."

She said nothing, and he continued:  "Our ideas about marriage and
divorce are particularly old-fashioned.  Our legislation favours
divorce--our social customs don't."

"Never?"

"Well--not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has
appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any
unconventional action to--to offensive insinuations--"

She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely
hoping for a flash of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial.
None came.

A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow, and a log
broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks.  The whole hushed and
brooding room seemed to be waiting silently with Archer.

"Yes," she murmured at length, "that's what my family tell me."

He winced a little.  "It's not unnatural--"

"OUR family," she corrected herself; and Archer coloured.  "For you'll
be my cousin soon," she continued gently.

"I hope so."

"And you take their view?"

He stood up at this, wandered across the room, stared with void eyes at
one of the pictures against the old red damask, and came back
irresolutely to her side.  How could he say:  "Yes, if what your
husband hints is true, or if you've no way of disproving it?"

"Sincerely--" she interjected, as he was about to speak.

He looked down into the fire.  "Sincerely, then--what should you gain
that would compensate for the possibility--the certainty--of a lot of
beastly talk?"

"But my freedom--is that nothing?"

It flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was
true, and that she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt.  How was he
to tell her that, if she really cherished such a plan, the laws of the
State were inexorably opposed to it?  The mere suspicion that the
thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and impatiently toward
her.  "But aren't you as free as air as it is?" he returned.  "Who can
touch you?  Mr. Letterblair tells me the financial question has been
settled--"

"Oh, yes," she said indifferently.

"Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely
disagreeable and painful?  Think of the newspapers--their vileness!
It's all stupid and narrow and unjust--but one can't make over society."

"No," she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and desolate that he
felt a sudden remorse for his own hard thoughts.

"The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is
supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention
that keeps the family together--protects the children, if there are
any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his
lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her
silence seemed to have laid bare.  Since she would not or could not say
the one word that would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let
her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret.  Better keep on
the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a
wound he could not heal.

"It's my business, you know," he went on, "to help you to see these
things as the people who are fondest of you see them.  The Mingotts,
the Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations: if I
didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be
fair of me, would it?"  He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her
in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence.

She said slowly:  "No; it wouldn't be fair."

The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a
gurgling appeal for attention.  Madame Olenska rose, wound it up and
returned to the fire, but without resuming her seat.

Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more
for either of them to say, and Archer stood up also.

"Very well; I will do what you wish," she said abruptly.  The blood
rushed to his forehead; and, taken aback by the suddenness of her
surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.

"I--I do want to help you," he said.

"You do help me.  Good night, my cousin."

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless.
She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat
under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter
night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

Unlike the members of New York Society, Ellen has no fear of literature. Archer reflects on this fact and the fact that Ellen has the mysterious ability to "reverse his values" as he walks to her home. Newland walks through the snowy night and arrives at Ellen1s home. Beaufort is there, trying to woo her away from her trip to Skuytercliff. Skuytercliff is the vacation home of the van der Luydens. Ellen tells Beaufort to leave because she has business with Archer. Newland is there to discuss the divorce. Newland encourages Ellen not to divorce because there is no way she can prove her innocence from a love affair after she left her husband. For this reason, she will be scandalized by the papers. Ellen agrees with Newland reluctantly.

Ellen pleads that she wants to be the same as everyone else; that, and her freedom, are what drive her desire for a divorce. This is ironic because it is Newland1s desire to have a life different than everyone else1s that leaves him dissatisfied with his engagement. It is these opposing needs which draw them together. It is how they fulfill each other

After dinner, Newland walks up Fifth Avenue toward Madame Olenska's. On the way, he sees many members of New York society who are also in the process of making various visits, including Mr. Beaufort, who is climbing into his carriage. Newland imagines that Mr. Beaufort is off to visit his mistress or in some other disreputable pursuit. Newland arrives at Madame Olenska's to the unpleasant surprise of... Mr. Beaufort, who is chatting with Madame Olenska when Newland walks in. Mr. Beaufort tries to convince Madame Olenska not to visit the van der Luydens and have fun with some performer types at a dinner he's giving. He invites Newland as well. Mr. Beaufort leaves. Newland then tells Madame Olenska that he works for Mr. Letterblair's firm. He advises her not to go through with the divorce because of the scandal it might cause, particularly if the stuff in her husband's letter were made public. Madame Olenska agrees. Newland kisses her hand and leaves.


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.

On a crowded night at the Wallack1s theater, Newland Archer attends a showing of Shaughraun for the love of one scene: two lovers parting in silence. It reminds him of when he left Ellen the last time they were together: when they had discussed her divorce. On seeing the scene and remembering Ellen, Newland begins to cry and gets up to leave the theater. As he is walking out, he sees Ellen; as he catches her eye, Mrs. Beaufort calls Newland over. He sits behind Ellen and Ellen whispers, "Do you think he will send her yellow roses tomorrow. She was alluding to the roses that Newland had sent her. He says, "I was thinking that too. She says, "What do you do while May is away. May is on vacation with her family in Florida. Newland is upset by the obviously suggestive question. She tells him that she has decided not to go through with the divorce because of him. Archer leaves the theater reflecting on a letter that May had sent him. In the letter, May pointed out that Newland is the only one in New York that can truly understand Ellen and that he should take care of her because she is lonely and unhappy.

Here we see that everything that has been left unsaid by Ellen  may be true. Ellen may feel the same way about Newland as he feels about her. Her understanding of the roses in the same context that Newland understands the scene of the play is eerie and points to the similarities between these characters. Their un-discussed romance becomes real in this chapter; this is a point of pivot in the novel. There are some more interesting allusions to the mortal/immortal contrast. Mr. van der Luyden is described as a protecting diety; May has a "gift of divination

More than a week has passed since Newland's visit with Madame Olenska. He is at Wallack's Theater for a performance of The Shaughraun. He really loves one of the scenes in this play. In the scene, the male lead leaves the female lead. She is turned away from him. Without her noticing, he kisses a black ribbon she is wearing around her neck and leaves. For some reason that night, this scene reminds Newland of his parting from Madame Olenska the last time he saw her. Afterwards, he is thanked by both Mrs. Welland and Mrs. Manson Mingott. They are pleased that Ellen had decided not to go through with the divorce. In the next box, he notices Madame Olenska sitting with the Beauforts, Lawrence Lefferts, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson. He goes over and Madame Olenska quietly asks him if he thinks the male lead will send the female lead some yellow roses. Newland is surprised. He had sent her yellow roses again without signing his name on the card. Madame Olenska asks Newland what he does while May is away in St. Augustine . Newland says he works. Beaufort barges in on the conversation, so Newland leaves the box. Newland thinks over a letter he received from May, in which she asked him to look after Ellen.


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.

While leaving the theater, Newland runs into his friend Ned Winsett. Ned immediately asks the name of the "swell dark woman". Newland recognizes that his curiosity is directed at Ellen and he is annoyed. Winsett explains that Ellen had bandaged up his little boy when he had fallen. Newland tells Ned that her name is Countess Olenska. Ned asks why a countess would live in his neighborhood; Newland says it is because she doesn1t care about social sign-posts. The next day, Newland searches all over town for yellow roses but cannot find them. He sends her a message so they can meet later in the day, but she doesn1t write him. On the third morning of hearing nothing from Ellen, he finally receives a letter from her. She said that she has "run away" and that she is staying with the van der Luydens in Skuytercliff. She says she feels "safe" with them. Newland immediately decides to accept an invitation and visit the Chiverses because they are only a few miles from Ellen.

What is interesting in this chapter is the discussion of freedom between Ned and Newland. Ned insists that "Life isn1t much of a fit for either of them. For Ned, life stinks because he cannot find a respectable job as a writer. Yet, for Newland, the loss of freedom is far more subtle. Ned encourages Newland to become a politician. But Newland thinks that such a life is not appropriate for a gentleman. Newland cannot even aspire to be a good lawyer because it is inappropriate to work for money. Like, Ellen desperate for freedom, Newland recognizes that there is no freedom to be had: the only approporate lifestyles include sport or culture. Also interesting in this chapter are two motifs: translation and literature explaining life. First, Archer does not quite understand Ellen1s letter to him; he thinks "I have run away" could mean much less than it seems to say. In English, the expression, "I have run away" usually suggests quite a dramatic situation; Newland believes it may be more correctly understood in French: the expression "Je me suis evadee" is the same as "I have run away" but has a much more casual significance. Newland also uses literature to "translate" Ellen1s letter. At first he cannot understand why the van der Luydens would invite Ellen to their home; but then he remembers a play he had seen in Paris and understands that the van der Luydens are kind to her because they are her saviors. The play, a form of literature, provides Newland with a way of translating life into meaning

In the lobby of the theater, he sees a journalist friend of his, Ned Winsett. They walk out together. Newland discovers that Ned Winsett lives in Madame Olenska's neighborhood. In fact, Madame Olenska had helped Winsett's son when he cut his knee. The next morning at work, Newland is bored. He sends a note to Madame Olenska to see if he can come by for a visit. No reply from Madame Olenska. The next day there is still no reply. Finally, on the third day, he receives a note from her. She's staying with the van der Luydens at their country home, Skuytercliff. She says she is running away from something, but she doesn't say what. Newland is bummed out. He has just declined an invitation to visit the Reggie Chivers's at their country home, which is close to Skuytercliff. He changes his mind and decides to visit them.


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.

Newland arrives at the Chiverses on Friday and on Sunday he leaves to visit Ellen. She has gone to church so he takes a cutter to find her. He sees her on the path from the church. They play in the snow and then go to the small Patroon house so they can talk privately. They had only spoken a few moments when she indicates that she is running away from Beaufort; suddenly he arrives and there can be no more discussion of the topic. Newland returns to New York, curious about just why she was running away. He drowns himself in great novels for a few days and then Ellen sends him a message asking him to visit her late and at night. Newland is not sure how to reply; so he leaves for St. Augustine Florida to visit May.

It seems that Ellen and Newland are playing a little bit of cat and mouse; running away from each other and then meeting again. First Ellen runs off to the mountains, then Newland runs off to St. Augustine. Ellen is seen throughout the scene in a red cloak; a sign of revitalization and passion

On Friday evening, Newland arrives at the Chivers's. On Saturday he spends all day with them and their guests. On Sunday he heads out for Skuytercliff to see Madame Olenska. When he arrives, the butler tells him that Madame Olenska has left with Mrs. van der Luyden for church, and Mr. van der Luyden is napping. Newland walks out to meet the women as they walk back. He's pleased to see that only Madame Olenska is walking down the road. Mrs. van der Luyden has gone off to Rhinebeck to visit some aunts. Newland and Madame Olenska go to a small old house on the grounds that used to belong to Mr. van der Luyden's ancestor. Newland tries to get Madame Olenska to tell him what she's running away from. In the course of their conversation, Newland turns his back on her in order to look out the window. He fantasizes about her throwing her arms around him. Instead, he sees Mr. Beaufort walking toward the house. Madame Olenska is dismayed to see Mr. Beaufort, but Newland calls out to him to let him know where they are. Mr. Beaufort and Madame Olenska head to the main house while Newland heads back to the Chivers's. On Monday he takes a train back to New York City and thinks over the events of the past weekend. That evening he is unpacking his books and decides to read a book of poems, The House of Life. Three days pass. On the fourth day he gets a note from Madame Olenska, who wants to explain about the past weekend. Newland thinks it over all night, then the next morning packs up a suitcase and hops a boat to St. Augustine.


When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine to the
house which had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's, and saw May
Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair, he wondered
why he had waited so long to come.

Here was the truth, here was reality, here was the life that belonged
to him; and he, who fancied himself so scornful of arbitrary
restraints, had been afraid to break away from his desk because of what
people might think of his stealing a holiday!

Her first exclamation was:  "Newland--has anything happened?" and it
occurred to him that it would have been more "feminine" if she had
instantly read in his eyes why he had come.  But when he answered:
"Yes--I found I had to see you," her happy blushes took the chill from
her surprise, and he saw how easily he would be forgiven, and how soon
even Mr. Letterblair's mild disapproval would be smiled away by a
tolerant family.

Early as it was, the main street was no place for any but formal
greetings, and Archer longed to be alone with May, and to pour out all
his tenderness and his impatience.  It still lacked an hour to the late
Welland breakfast-time, and instead of asking him to come in she
proposed that they should walk out to an old orange-garden beyond the
town.  She had just been for a row on the river, and the sun that
netted the little waves with gold seemed to have caught her in its
meshes.  Across the warm brown of her cheek her blown hair glittered
like silver wire; and her eyes too looked lighter, almost pale in their
youthful limpidity.  As she walked beside Archer with her long swinging
gait her face wore the vacant serenity of a young marble athlete.

To Archer's strained nerves the vision was as soothing as the sight of
the blue sky and the lazy river.  They sat down on a bench under the
orange-trees and he put his arm about her and kissed her.  It was like
drinking at a cold spring with the sun on it; but his pressure may have
been more vehement than he had intended, for the blood rose to her face
and she drew back as if he had startled her.

"What is it?" he asked, smiling; and she looked at him with surprise,
and answered:  "Nothing."

A slight embarrassment fell on them, and her hand slipped out of his.
It was the only time that he had kissed her on the lips except for
their fugitive embrace in the Beaufort conservatory, and he saw that
she was disturbed, and shaken out of her cool boyish composure.

"Tell me what you do all day," he said, crossing his arms under his
tilted-back head, and pushing his hat forward to screen the sun-dazzle.
To let her talk about familiar and simple things was the easiest way of
carrying on his own independent train of thought; and he sat listening
to her simple chronicle of swimming, sailing and riding, varied by an
occasional dance at the primitive inn when a man-of-war came in.  A few
pleasant people from Philadelphia and Baltimore were picknicking at the
inn, and the Selfridge Merrys had come down for three weeks because
Kate Merry had had bronchitis.  They were planning to lay out a lawn
tennis court on the sands; but no one but Kate and May had racquets,
and most of the people had not even heard of the game.

All this kept her very busy, and she had not had time to do more than
look at the little vellum book that Archer had sent her the week before
(the "Sonnets from the Portuguese"); but she was learning by heart "How
they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," because it was one of
the first things he had ever read to her; and it amused her to be able
to tell him that Kate Merry had never even heard of a poet called
Robert Browning.

Presently she started up, exclaiming that they would be late for
breakfast; and they hurried back to the tumble-down house with its
pointless porch and unpruned hedge of plumbago and pink geraniums where
the Wellands were installed for the winter.  Mr. Welland's sensitive
domesticity shrank from the discomforts of the slovenly southern hotel,
and at immense expense, and in face of almost insuperable difficulties,
Mrs. Welland was obliged, year after year, to improvise an
establishment partly made up of discontented New York servants and
partly drawn from the local African supply.

"The doctors want my husband to feel that he is in his own home;
otherwise he would be so wretched that the climate would not do him any
good," she explained, winter after winter, to the sympathising
Philadelphians and Baltimoreans; and Mr. Welland, beaming across a
breakfast table miraculously supplied with the most varied delicacies,
was presently saying to Archer: "You see, my dear fellow, we camp--we
literally camp.  I tell my wife and May that I want to teach them how
to rough it."

Mr. and Mrs. Welland had been as much surprised as their daughter by
the young man's sudden arrival; but it had occurred to him to explain
that he had felt himself on the verge of a nasty cold, and this seemed
to Mr. Welland an all-sufficient reason for abandoning any duty.

"You can't be too careful, especially toward spring," he said, heaping
his plate with straw-coloured griddle-cakes and drowning them in golden
syrup.  "If I'd only been as prudent at your age May would have been
dancing at the Assemblies now, instead of spending her winters in a
wilderness with an old invalid."

"Oh, but I love it here, Papa; you know I do.  If only Newland could
stay I should like it a thousand times better than New York."

"Newland must stay till he has quite thrown off his cold," said Mrs.
Welland indulgently; and the young man laughed, and said he supposed
there was such a thing as one's profession.

He managed, however, after an exchange of telegrams with the firm, to
make his cold last a week; and it shed an ironic light on the situation
to know that Mr. Letterblair's indulgence was partly due to the
satisfactory way in which his brilliant young junior partner had
settled the troublesome matter of the Olenski divorce.  Mr. Letterblair
had let Mrs. Welland know that Mr. Archer had "rendered an invaluable
service" to the whole family, and that old Mrs. Manson Mingott had been
particularly pleased; and one day when May had gone for a drive with
her father in the only vehicle the place produced Mrs. Welland took
occasion to touch on a topic which she always avoided in her daughter's
presence.

"I'm afraid Ellen's ideas are not at all like ours.  She was barely
eighteen when Medora Manson took her back to Europe--you remember the
excitement when she appeared in black at her coming-out ball?  Another
of Medora's fads--really this time it was almost prophetic!  That must
have been at least twelve years ago; and since then Ellen has never
been to America.  No wonder she is completely Europeanised."

"But European society is not given to divorce: Countess Olenska thought
she would be conforming to American ideas in asking for her freedom."
It was the first time that the young man had pronounced her name since
he had left Skuytercliff, and he felt the colour rise to his cheek.

Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately.  "That is just like the
extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us. They think we
dine at two o'clock and countenance divorce!  That is why it seems to
me so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York.  They
accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same
stupid stories."

Archer made no comment on this, and Mrs. Welland continued:  "But we do
most thoroughly appreciate your persuading Ellen to give up the idea.
Her grandmother and her uncle Lovell could do nothing with her; both of
them have written that her changing her mind was entirely due to your
influence--in fact she said so to her grandmother.  She has an
unbounded admiration for you.  Poor Ellen--she was always a wayward
child.  I wonder what her fate will be?"

"What we've all contrived to make it," he felt like answering.  "If
you'd all of you rather she should be Beaufort's mistress than some
decent fellow's wife you've certainly gone the right way about it."

He wondered what Mrs. Welland would have said if he had uttered the
words instead of merely thinking them.  He could picture the sudden
decomposure of her firm placid features, to which a lifelong mastery
over trifles had given an air of factitious authority.  Traces still
lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter's; and he asked
himself if May's face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged
image of invincible innocence.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the
innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against
experience!

"I verily believe," Mrs. Welland continued, "that if the horrible
business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband's
death-blow.  I don't know any of the details; I only ask not to, as I
told poor Ellen when she tried to talk to me about it.  Having an
invalid to care for, I have to keep my mind bright and happy.  But Mr.
Welland was terribly upset; he had a slight temperature every morning
while we were waiting to hear what had been decided.  It was the horror
of his girl's learning that such things were possible--but of course,
dear Newland, you felt that too.  We all knew that you were thinking of
May."

"I'm always thinking of May," the young man rejoined, rising to cut
short the conversation.

He had meant to seize the opportunity of his private talk with Mrs.
Welland to urge her to advance the date of his marriage.  But he could
think of no arguments that would move her, and with a sense of relief
he saw Mr. Welland and May driving up to the door.

His only hope was to plead again with May, and on the day before his
departure he walked with her to the ruinous garden of the Spanish
Mission.  The background lent itself to allusions to European scenes;
and May, who was looking her loveliest under a wide-brimmed hat that
cast a shadow of mystery over her too-clear eyes, kindled into
eagerness as he spoke of Granada and the Alhambra.

"We might be seeing it all this spring--even the Easter ceremonies at
Seville," he urged, exaggerating his demands in the hope of a larger
concession.

"Easter in Seville?  And it will be Lent next week!" she laughed.

"Why shouldn't we be married in Lent?" he rejoined; but she looked so
shocked that he saw his mistake.

"Of course I didn't mean that, dearest; but soon after Easter--so that
we could sail at the end of April.  I know I could arrange it at the
office."

She smiled dreamily upon the possibility; but he perceived that to
dream of it sufficed her.  It was like hearing him read aloud out of
his poetry books the beautiful things that could not possibly happen in
real life.

"Oh, do go on, Newland; I do love your descriptions."

"But why should they be only descriptions?  Why shouldn't we make them
real?"

"We shall, dearest, of course; next year."  Her voice lingered over it.

"Don't you want them to be real sooner?  Can't I persuade you to break
away now?"

She bowed her head, vanishing from him under her conniving hat-brim.

"Why should we dream away another year?  Look at me, dear!  Don't you
understand how I want you for my wife?"

For a moment she remained motionless; then she raised on him eyes of
such despairing dearness that he half-released her waist from his hold.
But suddenly her look changed and deepened inscrutably.  "I'm not sure
if I DO understand," she said.  "Is it--is it because you're not
certain of continuing to care for me?"

Archer sprang up from his seat.  "My God--perhaps--I don't know," he
broke out angrily.

May Welland rose also; as they faced each other she seemed to grow in
womanly stature and dignity.  Both were silent for a moment, as if
dismayed by the unforeseen trend of their words: then she said in a low
voice: "If that is it--is there some one else?"

"Some one else--between you and me?"  He echoed her words slowly, as
though they were only half-intelligible and he wanted time to repeat
the question to himself.  She seemed to catch the uncertainty of his
voice, for she went on in a deepening tone:  "Let us talk frankly,
Newland.  Sometimes I've felt a difference in you; especially since our
engagement has been announced."

"Dear--what madness!" he recovered himself to exclaim.

She met his protest with a faint smile.  "If it is, it won't hurt us to
talk about it."  She paused, and added, lifting her head with one of
her noble movements:  "Or even if it's true: why shouldn't we speak of
it?  You might so easily have made a mistake."

He lowered his head, staring at the black leaf-pattern on the sunny
path at their feet.  "Mistakes are always easy to make; but if I had
made one of the kind you suggest, is it likely that I should be
imploring you to hasten our marriage?"

She looked downward too, disturbing the pattern with the point of her
sunshade while she struggled for expression.  "Yes," she said at
length.  "You might want--once for all--to settle the question: it's
one way."

Her quiet lucidity startled him, but did not mislead him into thinking
her insensible.  Under her hat-brim he saw the pallor of her profile,
and a slight tremor of the nostril above her resolutely steadied lips.

"Well--?" he questioned, sitting down on the bench, and looking up at
her with a frown that he tried to make playful.

She dropped back into her seat and went on:  "You mustn't think that a
girl knows as little as her parents imagine.  One hears and one
notices--one has one's feelings and ideas.  And of course, long before
you told me that you cared for me, I'd known that there was some one
else you were interested in; every one was talking about it two years
ago at Newport.  And once I saw you sitting together on the verandah at
a dance--and when she came back into the house her face was sad, and I
felt sorry for her; I remembered it afterward, when we were engaged."

Her voice had sunk almost to a whisper, and she sat clasping and
unclasping her hands about the handle of her sunshade.  The young man
laid his upon them with a gentle pressure; his heart dilated with an
inexpressible relief.

"My dear child--was THAT it?  If you only knew the truth!"

She raised her head quickly.  "Then there is a truth I don't know?"

He kept his hand over hers.  "I meant, the truth about the old story
you speak of."

"But that's what I want to know, Newland--what I ought to know.  I
couldn't have my happiness made out of a wrong--an unfairness--to
somebody else.  And I want to believe that it would be the same with
you.  What sort of a life could we build on such foundations?"

Her face had taken on a look of such tragic courage that he felt like
bowing himself down at her feet.  "I've wanted to say this for a long
time," she went on.  "I've wanted to tell you that, when two people
really love each other, I understand that there may be situations which
make it right that they should--should go against public opinion.  And
if you feel yourself in any way pledged ... pledged to the person we've
spoken of ...  and if there is any way ... any way in which you can
fulfill your pledge ... even by her getting a divorce ...  Newland,
don't give her up because of me!"

His surprise at discovering that her fears had fastened upon an episode
so remote and so completely of the past as his love-affair with Mrs.
Thorley Rushworth gave way to wonder at the generosity of her view.
There was something superhuman in an attitude so recklessly unorthodox,
and if other problems had not pressed on him he would have been lost in
wonder at the prodigy of the Wellands' daughter urging him to marry his
former mistress.  But he was still dizzy with the glimpse of the
precipice they had skirted, and full of a new awe at the mystery of
young-girlhood.

For a moment he could not speak; then he said: "There is no pledge--no
obligation whatever--of the kind you think.  Such cases don't
always--present themselves quite as simply as ... But that's no matter
... I love your generosity, because I feel as you do about those things
... I feel that each case must be judged individually, on its own
merits ... irrespective of stupid conventionalities ... I mean, each
woman's right to her liberty--"  He pulled himself up, startled by the
turn his thoughts had taken, and went on, looking at her with a smile:
"Since you understand so many things, dearest, can't you go a little
farther, and understand the uselessness of our submitting to another
form of the same foolish conventionalities?  If there's no one and
nothing between us, isn't that an argument for marrying quickly, rather
than for more delay?"

She flushed with joy and lifted her face to his; as he bent to it he
saw that her eyes were full of happy tears.  But in another moment she
seemed to have descended from her womanly eminence to helpless and
timorous girlhood; and he understood that her courage and initiative
were all for others, and that she had none for herself.  It was evident
that the effort of speaking had been much greater than her studied
composure betrayed, and that at his first word of reassurance she had
dropped back into the usual, as a too-adventurous child takes refuge in
its mother's arms.

Archer had no heart to go on pleading with her; he was too much
disappointed at the vanishing of the new being who had cast that one
deep look at him from her transparent eyes.  May seemed to be aware of
his disappointment, but without knowing how to alleviate it; and they
stood up and walked silently home.

Newland travels to St. Augustine to see his fiance May. With her, "here was truth, here was reality. Newland kisses her when they can find a moment of seclusion, but the kiss is so hard and adamant that May pulls away. May and Newland have breakfast with her family. They thank Newland for convincing Ellen not to divorce. The day before his departure, Newland takes May to the Spanish gardens in order to encourage her to be his wife sooner. May says that perhaps the pressure is due to the fact that he may not continue to care for her much longer and marriage would be a security. She is worried he is still in love with the mistress from two years ago. Newland convinces her that this is not the case and she believes him and they embrace.

The true irony in this chapter is that May is right on the mark about Newland; he has fallen in love with another woman; he does want to rush the marriage because he fears that his love may not last for May. The only thing she has wrong is the woman. Newland is in love with Ellen and not Mrs. Thorley Rushmore. It is ironic and unfortunate that May1s intuition could be so accurate and yet not enough to reveal the truth. At the same time, we cannot dismiss May for being inaccurate. It is possible that she know the "other woman" is Ellen; she just does not disclose that she knows and alludes to Mrs. Thorley Rushmore just to show Newland that she knows what1s going on and has the proper composure to conceal her knowledge

When Newland arrives at St. Augustine, he meets up with May in front of their family home. He kisses her -- a little too firmly, because she seems taken aback. She's not that kind of girl. They go in for breakfast with May's family. The Wellands are concerned that Newland is coming down with a cold, and Newland encourages this illusion. He tells his employer that he'll be gone for a week taking care of his "cold." In a private conversation with Mrs. Welland, she thanks Newland for convincing Madame Olenska to give up her divorce suit. In a private conversation with May, Newland tries to convince her to push up the wedding date. She rejects the idea. May asks him if there's anybody else, say, a married woman? Newland thinks she's talking about his old flame Mrs. Thorley Rushworth, and says there's no one. May is pleased.