It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event
for a young couple to give their first big dinner.

The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had
received a good deal of company in an informal way.  Archer was fond of
having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with the
beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in
conjugal affairs.  Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself,
she would ever have asked any one to the house; but he had long given
up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which
tradition and training had moulded her.  It was expected that well-off
young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal
entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to
the tradition.

But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with
Roman punch, roses from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was
a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken.  As Mrs. Archer
remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but by
its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs or
terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with
short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.

It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their
first invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom
refused even by the seasoned and sought-after.  Still, it was
admittedly a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May's request, should
have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the
Countess Olenska.

The two mothers-in-law sat in May's drawing-room on the afternoon of
the great day, Mrs. Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany's thickest
gilt-edged bristol, while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the
palms and standard lamps.

Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there.  Mrs.
Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and
Mrs. Welland was considering the effect of bringing forward the large
gilt sofa, so that another "corner" might be created between the piano
and the window.

May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of
Jacqueminot roses and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and
the placing of the Maillard bonbons in openwork silver baskets between
the candelabra.  On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr.
van der Luyden had had sent from Skuytercliff.  Everything was, in
short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an event.

Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with
her sharp gold pen.

"Henry van der Luyden--Louisa--the Lovell Mingotts--the Reggie
Chiverses--Lawrence Lefferts and Gertrude--(yes, I suppose May was
right to have them)--the Selfridge Merrys, Sillerton Jackson, Van
Newland and his wife. (How time passes!  It seems only yesterday that
he was your best man, Newland)--and Countess Olenska--yes, I think
that's all...."

Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law affectionately.  "No one can say,
Newland, that you and May are not giving Ellen a handsome send-off."

"Ah, well," said Mrs. Archer, "I understand May's wanting her cousin to
tell people abroad that we're not quite barbarians."

"I'm sure Ellen will appreciate it.  She was to arrive this morning, I
believe.  It will make a most charming last impression.  The evening
before sailing is usually so dreary," Mrs. Welland cheerfully continued.

Archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him:
"Do go in and have a peep at the table.  And don't let May tire herself
too much."  But he affected not to hear, and sprang up the stairs to
his library.  The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed
into a polite grimace; and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly
"tidied," and prepared, by a judicious distribution of ash-trays and
cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.

"Ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long--" and he went on to his
dressing-room.

Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.
During those ten days Archer had had no sign from her but that conveyed
by the return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his office
in a sealed envelope addressed in her hand.  This retort to his last
appeal might have been interpreted as a classic move in a familiar
game; but the young man chose to give it a different meaning.  She was
still fighting against her fate; but she was going to Europe, and she
was not returning to her husband.  Nothing, therefore, was to prevent
his following her; and once he had taken the irrevocable step, and had
proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed she would not send
him away.

This confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the
present.  It had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any
sign or act, his misery and mortification.  It seemed to him that in
the deadly silent game between them the trumps were still in his hands;
and he waited.

There had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass;
as when Mr. Letterblair, the day after Madame Olenska's departure, had
sent for him to go over the details of the trust which Mrs. Manson
Mingott wished to create for her granddaughter.  For a couple of hours
Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior, all the
while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some
reason other than the obvious one of his cousinship; and that the close
of the conference would reveal it.

"Well, the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," Mr.
Letterblair had summed up, after mumbling over a summary of the
settlement.  "In fact I'm bound to say she's been treated pretty
handsomely all round."

"All round?" Archer echoed with a touch of derision.  "Do you refer to
her husband's proposal to give her back her own money?"

Mr. Letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch.  "My
dear sir, the law's the law; and your wife's cousin was married under
the French law.  It's to be presumed she knew what that meant."

"Even if she did, what happened subsequently--."  But Archer paused.
Mr. Letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated
nose, and was looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous
elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to understand that
virtue is not synonymous with ignorance.

"My dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's transgressions;
but--but on the other side ... I wouldn't put my hand in the fire ...
well, that there hadn't been tit for tat ... with the young
champion...."  Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded
paper toward Archer.  "This report, the result of discreet enquiries
..."  And then, as Archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to
repudiate the suggestion, the lawyer somewhat flatly continued:  "I
don't say it's conclusive, you observe; far from it.  But straws show
... and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory for all parties that
this dignified solution has been reached."

"Oh, eminently," Archer assented, pushing back the paper.

A day or two later, on responding to a summons from Mrs. Manson
Mingott, his soul had been more deeply tried.

He had found the old lady depressed and querulous.

"You know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting
for his reply:  "Oh, don't ask me why!  She gave so many reasons that
I've forgotten them all.  My private belief is that she couldn't face
the boredom.  At any rate that's what Augusta and my daughters-in-law
think.  And I don't know that I altogether blame her.  Olenski's a
finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer
than it is in Fifth Avenue.  Not that the family would admit that: they
think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in.  And
poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband.  She
held out as firmly as ever against that.  So she's to settle down in
Paris with that fool Medora....  Well, Paris is Paris; and you can keep
a carriage there on next to nothing.  But she was as gay as a bird, and
I shall miss her." Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down
her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her bosom.

"All I ask is," she concluded, "that they shouldn't bother me any more.
I must really be allowed to digest my gruel...."  And she twinkled a
little wistfully at Archer.

It was that evening, on his return home, that May announced her
intention of giving a farewell dinner to her cousin.  Madame Olenska's
name had not been pronounced between them since the night of her flight
to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with surprise.

"A dinner--why?" he interrogated.

Her colour rose.  "But you like Ellen--I thought you'd be pleased."

"It's awfully nice--your putting it in that way.  But I really don't
see--"

"I mean to do it, Newland," she said, quietly rising and going to her
desk.  "Here are the invitations all written.  Mother helped me--she
agrees that we ought to."  She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and
Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image of the Family.

"Oh, all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of
guests that she had put in his hand.

When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over
the fire and trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed
setting of immaculate tiles.

The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden's orchids had been
conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and
knobby silver.  Mrs. Newland Archer's drawing-room was generally
thought a great success.  A gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which the
primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to
the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze
reduction of the Venus of Milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale
brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered
with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames;
and tall rosy-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the
palms.

"I don't think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said May,
rising flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of
pardonable pride.  The brass tongs which she had propped against the
side of the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband's
answer; and before he could restore them Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden
were announced.

The other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der
Luydens liked to dine punctually.  The room was nearly full, and Archer
was engaged in showing to Mrs. Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished
Verbeckhoven "Study of Sheep," which Mr. Welland had given May for
Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska at his side.

She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser
and heavier than ever.  Perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound
several rows of amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of
the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children's parties, when
Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.

The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps
unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had
never loved it as he did at that minute.  Their hands met, and he
thought he heard her say:  "Yes, we're sailing tomorrow in the
Russia--"; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and
after an interval May's voice:  "Newland!  Dinner's been announced.
Won't you please take Ellen in?"

Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand
was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the
evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street
drawing-room.  All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have
taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on
his sleeve, and he said to himself: "If it were only to see her hand
again I  should  have  to follow her--."

It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign
visitor" that Mrs. van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being
placed on her host's left.  The fact of Madame Olenska's "foreignness"
could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell
tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her displacement with an
affability which left no doubt as to her approval.  There were certain
things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and
thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal
rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.  There
was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done
to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now
that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his
table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her
popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her
past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval.
Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her
nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat
at May's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify
all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd
imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and
ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the
proceedings.  As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to
another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's
canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale
woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy.  And then it came
over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of
them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense
peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies.  He guessed himself to have been,
for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and
patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown
to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had
been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife
on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined
anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May
Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and
cousin.

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood":
the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed
decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to
them.

As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a
prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.  He looked about the table,
and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in
which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort
and his wife.  "It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to
ME--" and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy
over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him
like the doors of the family vault.

He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.

"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile.  "Of course
poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side, I
suppose;" and Archer muttered:  "Of course."

At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other
neighbour had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right.
At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van
der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the
table.  It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could
not sit through the whole meal in silence.  He turned to Madame
Olenska, and her pale smile met him.  "Oh, do let's see it through," it
seemed to say.

"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised
him by its naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had
seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.

"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he
remarked that she would not suffer from that particular hardship in the
country she was going to.

"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than
once, in April, in the train between Calais and Paris."

She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could
always carry an extra rug, and that every form of travel had its
hardships; to which he abruptly returned that he thought them all of no
account compared with the blessedness of getting away.  She changed
colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch:  "I mean to
do a lot of travelling myself before long."  A tremor crossed her face,
and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out:  "I say, Reggie, what
do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean?  I'm
game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she could not
think of letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she
was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her husband
placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for
the International Polo match.

But Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase "round the world," and
having once circled the globe in his steam-yacht, he seized the
opportunity to send down the table several striking items concerning
the shallowness of the Mediterranean ports.  Though, after all, he
added, it didn't matter; for when you'd seen Athens and Smyrna and
Constantinople, what else was there?  And Mrs. Merry said she could
never be too grateful to Dr. Bencomb for having made them promise not
to go to Naples on account of the fever.

"But you must have three weeks to do India properly," her husband
conceded, anxious to have it understood that he was no frivolous
globe-trotter.

And at this point the ladies went up to the drawing-room.

In the library, in spite of weightier presences, Lawrence Lefferts
predominated.

The talk, as usual, had veered around to the Beauforts, and even Mr.
van der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, installed in the honorary
arm-chairs tacitly reserved for them, paused to listen to the younger
man's philippic.

Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian
manhood and exalt the sanctity of the home.  Indignation lent him a
scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had followed his
example, and acted as he talked, society would never have been weak
enough to receive a foreign upstart like Beaufort--no, sir, not even if
he'd married a van der Luyden or a Lanning instead of a Dallas.  And
what chance would there have been, Lefferts wrathfully questioned, of
his marrying into such a family as the Dallases, if he had not already
wormed his way into certain houses, as people like Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake?  If society chose to
open its doors to vulgar women the harm was not great, though the gain
was doubtful; but once it got in the way of tolerating men of obscure
origin and tainted wealth the end was total disintegration--and at no
distant date.

"If things go on at this pace," Lefferts thundered, looking like a
young prophet dressed by Poole, and who had not yet been stoned, "we
shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses,
and marrying Beaufort's bastards."

"Oh, I say--draw it mild!" Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested,
while Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely alarmed, and an expression
of pain and disgust settled on Mr. van der Luyden's sensitive face.

"Has he got any?" cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears;
and while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old
gentleman twittered into Archer's ear:  "Queer, those fellows who are
always wanting to set things right.  The people who have the worst
cooks are always telling you they're poisoned when they dine out.  But
I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence's
diatribe:--typewriter this time, I understand...."

The talk swept past Archer like some senseless river running and
running because it did not know enough to stop.  He saw, on the faces
about him, expressions of interest, amusement and even mirth.  He
listened to the younger men's laughter, and to the praise of the Archer
Madeira, which Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully
celebrating.  Through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude
of friendliness toward himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt
himself to be were trying to soften his captivity; and the perception
increased his passionate determination to be free.

In the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met
May's triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything
had "gone off" beautifully.  She rose from Madame Olenska's side, and
immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the
gilt sofa where she throned.  Mrs. Selfridge Merry bore across the room
to join them, and it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy
of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on.  The silent
organisation which held his little world together was determined to put
itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety
of Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic
felicity.  All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely
engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of,
suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary;
and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more
disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's
lover.  He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for
the first time understood that she shared the belief.  The discovery
roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his
efforts to discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs. Reggie Chivers
and little Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on, running and
running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop.

At length he saw that Madame Olenska had risen and was saying good-bye.
He understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to remember
what he had said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single
word they had exchanged.

She went up to May, the rest of the company making a circle about her
as she advanced.  The two young women clasped hands; then May bent
forward and kissed her cousin.

"Certainly our hostess is much the handsomer of the two," Archer heard
Reggie Chivers say in an undertone to young Mrs. Newland; and he
remembered Beaufort's coarse sneer at May's ineffectual beauty.

A moment later he was in the hall, putting Madame Olenska's cloak about
her shoulders.

Through all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to
say nothing that might startle or disturb her.  Convinced that no power
could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to let events
shape themselves as they would.  But as he followed Madame Olenska into
the hall he thought with a sudden hunger of being for a moment alone
with her at the door of her carriage.

"Is your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der
Luyden, who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said
gently:  "We are driving dear Ellen home."

Archer's heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and
fan with one hand, held out the other to him.  "Good-bye," she said.

"Good-bye--but I shall see you soon in Paris," he answered aloud--it
seemed to him that he had shouted it.

"Oh," she murmured, "if you and May could come--!"

Mr. van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned to
Mrs. van der Luyden.  For a moment, in the billowy darkness inside the
big landau, he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining
steadily--and she was gone.

As he went up the steps he crossed Lawrence Lefferts coming down with
his wife.  Lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let
Gertrude pass.

"I say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that I'm
dining with you at the club tomorrow night?  Thanks so much, you old
brick!  Good-night."

"It DID go off beautifully, didn't it?" May questioned from the
threshold of the library.

Archer roused himself with a start.  As soon as the last carriage had
driven away, he had come up to the library and shut himself in, with
the hope that his wife, who still lingered below, would go straight to
her room.  But there she stood, pale and drawn, yet radiating the
factitious energy of one who has passed beyond fatigue.

"May I come and talk it over?" she asked.

"Of course, if you like.  But you must be awfully sleepy--"

"No, I'm not sleepy.  I should like to sit with you a little."

"Very well," he said, pushing her chair near the fire.

She sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long
time.  At length Archer began abruptly: "Since you're not tired, and
want to talk, there's something I must tell you.  I tried to the other
night--."

She looked at him quickly.  "Yes, dear.  Something about yourself?"

"About myself.  You say you're not tired: well, I am.  Horribly tired
..."

In an instant she was all tender anxiety.  "Oh, I've seen it coming on,
Newland!  You've been so wickedly overworked--"

"Perhaps it's that.  Anyhow, I want to make a break--"

"A break?  To give up the law?"

"To go away, at any rate--at once.  On a long trip, ever so far
off--away from everything--"

He paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with
the indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary
to welcome it.  Do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated.
"Away from everything--" he repeated.

"Ever so far?  Where, for instance?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know.  India--or Japan."

She stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his
hands, he felt her warmly and fragrantly hovering over him.

"As far as that?  But I'm afraid you can't, dear ..." she said in an
unsteady voice.  "Not unless you'll take me with you."  And then, as he
was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each
separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain:  "That is,
if the doctors will let me go ... but I'm afraid they won't.  For you
see, Newland, I've been sure since this morning of something I've been
so longing and hoping for--"

He looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and
roses, and hid her face against his knee.

"Oh, my dear," he said, holding her to him while his cold hand stroked
her hair.

There was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident
laughter; then May freed herself from his arms and stood up.

"You didn't guess--?"

"Yes--I; no.  That is, of course I hoped--"

They looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then,
turning his eyes from hers, he asked abruptly:  "Have you told any one
else?"

"Only Mamma and your mother."  She paused, and then added hurriedly,
the blood flushing up to her forehead:  "That is--and Ellen.  You know
I told you we'd had a long talk one afternoon--and how dear she was to
me."

"Ah--" said Archer, his heart stopping.

He felt that his wife was watching him intently.  "Did you MIND my
telling her first, Newland?"

"Mind?  Why should I?"  He made a last effort to collect himself.  "But
that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it?  I thought you said you weren't
sure till today."

Her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze.  "No; I wasn't sure
then--but I told her I was.  And you see I was right!" she exclaimed,
her blue eyes wet with victory.

Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East
Thirty-ninth Street.

He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration
of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle of
those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the
throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically
catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some one
say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting
alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure
in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of
the old Museum.

The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking
with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the
scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had
happened.  There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to
him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young
women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a
child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to
church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop
of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the
pride and ornament of his diocese.  There Dallas had first staggered
across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse laughed behind
the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother),
had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Reggie
Chivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her through her
wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them
to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled on its
foundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchanged
institution.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future
of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,
Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for
sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had
finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a
rising New York architect.

The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and
business and taking up all sorts of new things.  If they were not
absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that
they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture
or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the
prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting
Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word
"Colonial."  Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the
millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that
library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one
evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,
banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician!  You're the kind of man the country
wants, Archer.  If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you
have got to lend a hand in the cleaning."

"Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase!  How eagerly he
had risen up at the call!  It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal
to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man
who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was
irresistible.

Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself WERE what
his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore
Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,
for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and
had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and
from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the
reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its
apathy.  It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered
to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked
forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which
their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new
state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built
wall.  He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature
a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to
contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship
to be his strength and pride.

He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good
citizen."  In New York, for many years past, every new movement,
philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinion
and wanted his name.  People said:  "Ask Archer" when there was a
question of starting the first school for crippled children,
reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club, inaugurating
the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music.  His
days were full, and they were filled decently.  He supposed it was all
a man ought to ask.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.  But he thought of
it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined
would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first
prize in a lottery.  There were a hundred million tickets in HIS
lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too
decidedly against him.  When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was
abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a
book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he
had missed.  That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him
from thinking of other women.  He had been what was called a faithful
husband; and when May had suddenly died--carried off by the infectious
pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he had
honestly mourned her.  Their long years together had shown him that it
did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept
the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of
ugly appetites.  Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and
mourned for it.  After all, there was good in the old ways.

His eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas with
English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white
and pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlake
writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his
first photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.

There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin
and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the
Mission garden.  And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;
never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous,
faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of
growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt
itself without her ever being conscious of the change.  This hard
bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered.
Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their
views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first,
a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in
which father and children had unconsciously collaborated.  And she had
died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious
households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was
convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate
in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his
parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her)
would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill.  And of Mary she was
sure as of her own self.  So, having snatched little Bill from the
grave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to her
place in the Archer vault in St.  Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already lay
safe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had never
even become aware of.

Opposite May's portrait stood one of her daughter.  Mary Chivers was as
tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and
slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required.  Mary Chivers's
mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the
twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned.  And
the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely
girt as her figure.  Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more
intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views.  There
was good in the new order too.

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs,
unhooked the transmitter at his elbow.  How far they were from the days
when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's
only means of quick communication!

"Chicago wants you."

Ah--it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent to
Chicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the Lakeside palace they
were to build for a young millionaire with ideas.  The firm always sent
Dallas on such errands.

"Hallo, Dad--Yes: Dallas.  I say--how do you feel about sailing on
Wednesday?  Mauretania: Yes, next Wednesday as ever is.  Our client
wants me to look at some Italian gardens before we settle anything, and
has asked me to nip over on the next boat.  I've got to be back on the
first of June--" the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh--"so we
must look alive.  I say, Dad, I want your help: do come."

Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by and
natural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by the
fire.  The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for
long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as
electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages.  But the laugh did
startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and
miles of country--forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and
busy indifferent millions--Dallas's laugh should be able to say: "Of
course, whatever happens, I must get back on the first, because Fanny
Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth."

The voice began again:  "Think it over?  No, sir: not a minute.  You've
got to say yes now.  Why not, I'd like to know?  If you can allege a
single reason--No; I knew it.  Then it's a go, eh?  Because I count on
you to ring up the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd better
book a return on a boat from Marseilles.  I say, Dad; it'll be our last
time together, in this kind of way--.  Oh, good!  I knew you would."

Chicago rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace up and down the
room.

It would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy was
right.  They would have lots of other "times" after Dallas's marriage,
his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and Fanny
Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to
interfere with their intimacy.  On the contrary, from what he had seen
of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it.  Still,
change was change, and differences were differences, and much as he
felt himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was tempting
to seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.

There was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound one
that he had lost the habit of travel.  May had disliked to move except
for valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea or in the
mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving the house in
Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at the Wellands' in
Newport.  After Dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her duty
to travel for six months; and the whole family had made the
old-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland and Italy.  Their time
being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted France.  Archer
remembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont Blanc
instead of Rheims and Chartres.  But Mary and Bill wanted
mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in Dallas's wake
through the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her children,
had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic and
artistic proclivities.  She had indeed proposed that her husband should
go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the Italian lakes after
they had "done" Switzerland; but Archer had declined.  "We'll stick
together," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting such a
good example to Dallas.

Since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason for
his continuing in the same routine.  His children had urged him to
travel: Mary Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad
and "see the galleries."  The very mysteriousness of such a cure made
her the more confident of its efficacy.  But Archer had found himself
held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from
new things.

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for
doing anything else.  At least that was the view that the men of his
generation had taken.  The trenchant divisions between right and wrong,
honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little
scope for the unforeseen.  There are moments when a man's imagination,
so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily
level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.  Archer hung there and
wondered....

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose
standards had bent and bound him?  He remembered a sneering prophecy of
poor Lawrence Lefferts's, uttered years ago in that very room:  "If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort's
bastards."

It was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing;
and nobody wondered or reproved.  Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who still
looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her
mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and
carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and
Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a
"set" from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned
beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an
Isabey miniature.

Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the
death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won
it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid
of her, society took her joyfully for granted.  She was pretty, amusing
and accomplished: what more did any one want?  Nobody was narrow-minded
enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's
past and her own origin.  Only the older people remembered so obscure
an incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or
the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to the
notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a
little girl who inherited her beauty.  He was subsequently heard of in
Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American
travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he
represented a large insurance agency.  He and his wife died there in
the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had
appeared in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack
Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian.  The
fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's
children, and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was
announced.

Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the
world had travelled.  People nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms
and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much
about their neighbours.  And of what account was anybody's past, in the
huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same
plane?

Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety
of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and
eagerness of youth.

It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening
waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot
temples.  He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in
the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not.  "It
functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he
reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had
announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would
approve.

"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that
they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took
it for granted that we shouldn't.  Only, I wonder--the thing one's so
certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"

It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine
held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the
Place Vendome.  One of the things he had stipulated--almost the only
one--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris,
he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."

"Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed.  "I'll take
you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving his
father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and
emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for
its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the
scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and
he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's
life.  Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had
gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the
avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public
gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll
of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and
pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.  Now the spectacle
was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy,
old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....

Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder.  "Hullo, father: this
is something like, isn't it?"  They stood for a while looking out in
silence, and then the young man continued:  "By the way, I've got a
message for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past
five."

He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual
item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave
for Florence the next evening.  Archer looked at him, and thought he
saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's
malice.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued.  "Fanny made me swear to do
three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last
Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska.  You
know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from
Buenos Ayres to the Assomption.  Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, and
Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays.
I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's.  And
she's our cousin, of course.  So I rang her up this morning, before I
went out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to
see her."

Archer continued to stare at him.  "You told her I was here?"

"Of course--why not?"  Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically.  Then,
getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a
confidential pressure.

"I say, father: what was she like?"

Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze.  "Come, own
up: you and she were great pals, weren't you?  Wasn't she most awfully
lovely?"

"Lovely?  I don't know.  She was different."

"Ah--there you have it!  That's what it always comes to, doesn't it?
When she comes, SHE'S DIFFERENT--and one doesn't know why.  It's
exactly what I feel about Fanny."

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm.  "About Fanny?  But, my
dear fellow--I should hope so!  Only I don't see--"

"Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric!  Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.  He was the
first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to
inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve.  "What's the use of
making mysteries?  It only makes people want to nose 'em out," he
always objected when enjoined to discretion.  But Archer, meeting his
eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

"My Fanny?"

"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't,"
continued his surprising son.

"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

"No: you date, you see, dear old boy.  But mother said--"

"Your mother?"

"Yes: the day before she died.  It was when she sent for me alone--you
remember?  She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would
be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you
most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence.  His eyes
remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the
window.  At length he said in a low voice:  "She never asked me."

"No.  I forgot.  You never did ask each other anything, did you?  And
you never told each other anything.  You just sat and watched each
other, and guessed at what was going on underneath.  A deaf-and-dumb
asylum, in fact!  Well, I back your generation for knowing more about
each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about
our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me?  If
you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's.  I've got to
rush out to Versailles afterward."

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles.  He preferred to spend
the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris.  He had to deal all
at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.

After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion.  It
seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all,
some one had guessed and pitied....  And that it should have been his
wife moved him indescribably.  Dallas, for all his affectionate
insight, would not have understood that.  To the boy, no doubt, the
episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted
forces.  But was it really no more?  For a long time Archer sat on a
bench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life
rolled by....

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited.  She had
never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years
before, she had made no change in her way of living.  There was nothing
now to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries
gardens to the Louvre.  She had once told him that she often went
there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place
where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been.  For an hour
or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of
afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their
half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of
beauty.  After all, his life had been too starved....

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying:  "But
I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away.  For such summer
dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of
friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and
together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the
bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was
talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles.  He had had but one
previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to
pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with
the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure
criticism tripped each other up on his lips.

As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness
increased.  The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the
facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a
master but as an equal.  "That's it: they feel equal to things--they
know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman
of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and
with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm.  "Oh, by
Jove," he exclaimed.

They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the
Invalides.  The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding
trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself
all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol
of the race's glory.

Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the
avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter
as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit
it up.  Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light
became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived.  For
nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely
little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to
be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs.  He thought of the
theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at,
the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people
she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,
images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a
setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young
Frenchman who had once said to him:  "Ah, good conversation--there is
nothing like it, is there?"

Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty
years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame
Olenska's existence.  More than half a lifetime divided them, and she
had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society
he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly
understand.  During that time he had been living with his youthful
memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible
companionship.  Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something
apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim
chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....

They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of
the thoroughfares flanking the building.  It was a quiet quarter, after
all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one
an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this
were left to the few and the indifferent.

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by
a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square
into which they had turned.  Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

"It must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with
a movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood
together looking up at the house.

It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but
many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured
front.  On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the
rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were
still lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

"I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
porte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to
say:  "The fifth.  It must be the one with the awnings."

Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end
of their pilgrimage had been attained.

"I say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.

The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.

"I believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.

"Why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed.

"Oh, perfectly.  But I should like you, please, to go up without me."

Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered.  "But, I say, Dad: do you
mean you won't come up at all?"

"I don't know," said Archer slowly.

"If you don't she won't understand."

"Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."

Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

"But what on earth shall I say?"

"My dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father
rejoined with a smile.

"Very well.  I shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking up
the five flights because you don't like lifts."

His father smiled again.  "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough."

Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture,
passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.

Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged
balcony.  He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up
in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to
the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room.  He pictured Dallas
entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful
smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy
"took after him."

Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at
that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark
lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out
a long thin hand with three rings on it....  He thought she would be
sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her
on a table.

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard
himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose
its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each
other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes
never turning from the balcony.  At length a light shone through the
windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew
up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got
up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

A Note on the Text

The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large installments in The
Pictorial Review, from July to October 1920.  It was published that
same year in book form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and in
London.  Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation, and spelling
changes and revisions between the serial and book publication, and more
than thirty subsequent changes were made after the second impression of
the book edition had been run off.  This authoritative text is
reprinted from the Library of America edition of Novels by Edith
Wharton, and is based on the sixth impression of the first edition,
which incorporates the last set of extensive revisions that are
obviously authorial.

More than a week passes, and Archer has still not heard from Ellen since their meeting in the Museum. In the meantime, his law office has settled a generous trust fund for Ellen on the request of Mrs. Mingott. May tells Archer that she wishes to give her first formal dinner in honor of the departure of Countess Olenska. At the dinner, Archer notices that the guests are remarkably kind to Ellen now that she is about to leave. With a start, he realizes that the entire clan assumes that he has been having an affair with Ellen for quite some time. Although the guests are too polite to even allude to the affair, their elaborately feigned innocence is, to Archer, the surest sign that they suspect an infidelity. Suddenly, the dinner seems to be the disguise for a celebratory send-off of a member of the clan who has violated their strict social code. After dinner, Archer gathers with the other gentlemen in his library. Archer is disgusted by the hypocrisy of Larry Lefferts, who self-righteously condemns Beaufort's infidelities despite his own illicit affairs. The guests finally leave, after paying their warmest respects to Ellen. Alone in his library, Archer and May discuss the success of the evening. Archer has again resolved to tell May of his feelings for Ellen, when she reveals to him that she is pregnant. She tells him that she wasn't positive until that morning, but that she had told Ellen in their long conversation two weeks earlier the she was pregnant. It is now twenty-five years later, and the world has changed significantly. Archer is now considered to be a model citizen, a philanthropist, and a dutiful father. We learn that May had died from pneumonia two years earlier, after nursing their youngest child back to health. Archer had remained a dutiful husband throughout the rest of their marriage, and May died no less innocent of the world than at her youth. The memory of Ellen Olenska has kept Archer from pursuing other women. At fifty-seven, he finds himself less adventurous, more inclined to old habits than in his youth, and he is bewildered by the new social freedoms available for his grown children. Archer's eldest son convinces him to accompany him to Paris for a few weeks. Once there, he surprises Archer by informing him that they are to visit the Countess Olenska at her Paris apartment. Archer's son asks him if it was true that he had once been in love with the Countess. The son continues by remarking that May had told him the day before she died that Archer had "given up the thing he most wanted" when she had asked him to. Emotionally, Archer responds that she had never asked him. That afternoon, Archer does not join his son in calling on Ellen Olenska. Down on the street below her apartment, he visualizes entering her apartment. He decides that she is more real to him in his imagination than if he went up. As Archer stares up at the apartment balcony, a manservant appears at the window and closes the shutters. As if his cue, Archer returns alone to his hotel.

The scene of the Archers' dinner party is one of the most ironic moments in the novel. As Archer sits surrounded by his family and friends, it dawns on him as to why they are acting so cordially toward Ellen. She is leaving them permanently. Now that they are certain that she will no longer threaten their stable little society, they are willing to give her a celebratory send-off. Just as suddenly, Archer realizes why they are so eager for her to leave: they assume that he and Ellen have been having an affair for months. It is unbearably ironic to Archer that they are convinced that he has been enjoying an affair when in reality this is the very thing he has not been able to attain. His situation is contrasted by that of Larry Lefferts, who, as he leaves, asks Archer to cover for him so he can meet with his own mistress the next night. That Lefferts's real adulteries can remain hidden under a veneer of manners and pious exclamations while Archer's supposed affair leaves him vulnerable to judgment increases the scene's sense of irony. Between Chapter 33 and 34, there is an enormous chronological gap of about twenty-six years. By abruptly switching to the turn of the century without showing any development of plot or characters, Wharton indicates the discontinuity of the past with the present. By the time Archer reaches middle- age, the world around him has changed dramatically. His children have less leisure time but more freedom and more opportunities than he ever had. The world of his youth is now considered old-fashioned, even a little obsolete. This perhaps explains why Archer's life with May after the announcement of her pregnancy is told as if it were a history. Even though his life with her is important in explaining his current circumstances, May remains only as a memory of the irretrievable past. What about Ellen? Is she, too, relegated to the past, to remain a hazy image in Archer's memory? It has been many years since he last saw her at May's dinner party, and he cannot imagine how she must have changed from the young woman he remembers. He wonders, in turn, what Ellen remembers of him, whether or not he only remains in her memory "like a relic in a small dim chapel." In Paris, Archer is faced with the rather bewildering prospect of seeing her once again. Standing on the street below her apartment, he sees how different her life must have become in the last twenty-six years. He wonders how the present reality and his own idealized memories of Ellen can possibly connect. In the end Archer chooses to be left with the memory of Ellen and not Ellen herself. Not seeing the real--and now significantly older--person allows him, in certain respects, to maintain her as a symbolic presence, an emblem of the wistfulness and regrets of his youth. This quiet wistful ending is not what the reader expects. It is neither tragic nor happy. Nor is it inevitable. There is now nothing stopping Archer from reuniting with Ellen; he is only in his fifties, he has been widowed, and he is living in a new and liberal age. If Wharton had chosen to have the two characters meet again, there could be two possible outcomes. Either they would passionately reunite, or they would realize that they had changed too much in their time apart. But Wharton does not allow us to see either possibility. By departing from a traditional happy or tragic ending, she frustrates her readers' expectations. As with Archer's and Ellen's unconsummated affair, Wharton leaves the plot incomplete rather than giving it a predictable ending.