The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.

The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and
cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals
along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of
petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.

Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house
(which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the
verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large
targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery.  On the
other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent,
with benches and garden-seats about it.  A number of ladies in summer
dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the
lawn or sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in
starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her
shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their
talk to watch the result.

Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously
down upon this scene.  On each side of the shiny painted steps was a
large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand.  A spiky
green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border
of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums.  Behind him, the
French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave
glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors
islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered
with trifles in silver.

The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the
Beauforts'.  The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet,
was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter
game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,
and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes
the bow and arrow held their own.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle.  It surprised
him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions
to it had so completely changed.  It was Newport that had first brought
home to him the extent of the change.  In New York, during the previous
winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow
house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped
back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of
this daily activity had served as a link with his former self.  Then
there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey
stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and
the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out
as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables.  At the Century he had found Winsett
again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own
set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to
dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening
at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a
fairly real and inevitable sort of business.

But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of
unmitigated holiday-making.  Archer had tried to persuade May to spend
the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and
Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came
reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence
amid woods and waters.

But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the
square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good
reason why he and May should not join them there.  As Mrs. Welland
rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer
had as yet found no answer.

May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with
so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer.  She reminded
him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this
was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to
like it better than ever now that they were to be there together.  But
as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly
peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to
like it at all.

It was not May's fault, poor dear.  If, now and then, during their
travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been
restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.  He had
always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been
right.  He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a
perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless
sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had
represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of
an unescapable duty.

He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had
fulfilled all that he had expected.  It was undoubtedly gratifying to
be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young married
women in New York, especially when she was also one of the
sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and Archer had never
been insensible to such advantages.  As for the momentary madness which
had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself
to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments.  The idea that
he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess
Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory
simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather
empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons
why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if
they had been children playing in a grave-yard.

He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson
fluttered out of the drawing-room window.  As usual, she was
extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat
anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little
black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over
her much larger hatbrim.

"My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived!  You
yourself came only yesterday, you say?  Ah,
business--business--professional duties ... I understand.  Many
husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except
for the week-end."  She cocked her head on one side and languished at
him through screwed-up eyes.  "But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I
used often to remind my Ellen--"

Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once
before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and
the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had
apparently found voice to put.

"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious
solitude at Portsmouth.  Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous
trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse
of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural
life.  The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old
farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative
people ..."  She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and
added with a faint blush:  "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a
series of Inner Thought meetings there.  A contrast indeed to this gay
scene of worldly pleasure--but then I have always lived on contrasts!
To me the only death is monotony.  I always say to Ellen: Beware of
monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.  But my poor child is
going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world.  You
know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at
Newport, even with her grandmother Mingott?  I could hardly persuade
her to come with me to the Blenkers', if you will believe it!  The life
she leads is morbid, unnatural.  Ah, if she had only listened to me
when it was still possible ... When the door was still open ... But
shall we go down and watch this absorbing match?  I hear your May is
one of the competitors."

Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn,
tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of
his own orchids in its buttonhole.  Archer, who had not seen him for
two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance.  In
the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but
for his erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an
over-fed and over-dressed old man.

There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort.  In the spring
he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new
steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had
touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his
company.  The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled
bath-rooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him
half a million; and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his
wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are
apt to be.  Beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand the
strain; and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in Fifth
Avenue but in Wall Street.  Some people said he had speculated
unfortunately in railways, others that he was being bled by one of the
most insatiable members of her profession; and to every report of
threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the
building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string of
race-horses, or the addition of a new Meissonnier or Cabanel to his
picture-gallery.

He advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual
half-sneering smile.  "Hullo, Medora!  Did the trotters do their
business?  Forty minutes, eh?  ...  Well, that's not so bad,
considering your nerves had to be spared."  He shook hands with Archer,
and then, turning back with them, placed himself on Mrs. Manson's other
side, and said, in a low voice, a few words which their companion did
not catch.

The Marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a "Que
voulez-vous?" which deepened Beaufort's frown; but he produced a good
semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say:
"You know May's going to carry off the first prize."

"Ah, then it remains in the family," Medora rippled; and at that moment
they reached the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of
mauve muslin and floating veils.

May Welland was just coming out of the tent.  In her white dress, with
a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she
had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the Beaufort
ball-room on the night of her engagement.  In the interval not a
thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her
heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both
he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from
her.

She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the
chalk-mark traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and
took aim.  The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of
appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of
proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being.
Her rivals--Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the Merry girls, and divers rosy
Thorleys, Dagonets and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious
group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins
and flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow.  All were young
and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like
ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent
her soul upon some feat of strength.

"Gad," Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds
the bow as she does"; and Beaufort retorted:  "Yes; but that's the only
kind of target she'll ever hit."

Archer felt irrationally angry.  His host's contemptuous tribute to
May's "niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear
said of his wife.  The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking
in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words
sent a faint shiver through his heart.  What if "niceness" carried to
that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an
emptiness?  As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her
final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that
curtain.

She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the
company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace.  No one could
ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling
that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them.  But
when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she
saw in his.

Mrs. Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they
drove off among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and
Archer sitting at her side.

The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and
shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of
victorias, dog-carts, landaus and "vis-a-vis," carrying well-dressed
ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward
from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.

"Shall we go to see Granny?" May suddenly proposed.  "I should like to
tell her myself that I've won the prize.  There's lots of time before
dinner."

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue,
crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to
precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a
many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land
overlooking the bay.  Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs
spread themselves above the island-dotted waters.  A winding drive led
up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped
verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow
star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms
with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian
house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus.  One of these
rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of
flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days,
enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and
perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of
her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set
in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the
chair-arms.

Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine
had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites
toward the person served.  She was persuaded that irrepressible passion
was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of
impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she
always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of
allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.

She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow
which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match,
remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought
enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely.

"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled.  "You
must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white arm
and watched the colour flood her face.  "Well, well, what have I said
to make you shake out the red flag?  Ain't there going to be any
daughters--only boys, eh?  Good gracious, look at her blushing again
all over her blushes!  What--can't I say that either?  Mercy me--when
my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that
NOTHING can shock!"

Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.

"Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall
never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the
ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed:  "Cousin Medora?  But I
thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So
she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen.  Ah--you
didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me?  Such fol-de-rol,
her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young people
about fifty years ago.  Ellen--ELLEN!" she cried in her shrill old
voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn
beyond the verandah.

There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick
on the shiny floor.  A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban,
replying to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen "Miss
Ellen" going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to
Archer.

"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will
describe the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a
dream.

He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during
the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with
the main incidents of her life in the interval.  He knew that she had
spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to have gone a
great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly
sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been at such pains to
find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington.  There,
during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of pretty
women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic society"
that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of the
Administration.  He had listened to these accounts, and to various
contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point of
view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one
listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora
suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a
living presence to him again.  The Marchioness's foolish lisp had
called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of
the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street.  He thought of
a story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a
bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in
their painted tomb ...

The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was
perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years.  Beyond it lay
the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its
low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset
haze.

From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of
pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning
against the rail, her back to the shore.  Archer stopped at the sight
as if he had waked from sleep.  That vision of the past was a dream,
and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead:
was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at
the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing
with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue
Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the
drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for it
was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is
happening at a given hour.

"What am I?  A son-in-law--" Archer thought.

The figure at the end of the pier had not moved.  For a long moment the
young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed with
the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft and
the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs.  The lady in the
summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight.  Beyond the grey
bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a
thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it
beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and
Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that
he was in the room.

"She doesn't know--she hasn't guessed.  Shouldn't I know if she came up
behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself:  "If
she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go
back."

The boat was gliding out on the receding tide.  It slid before the Lime
Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across the
turret in which the light was hung.  Archer waited till a wide space of
water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the
boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move.

He turned and walked up the hill.

"I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her
again," May said as they drove home through the dusk.  "But perhaps she
wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed."

"Changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on
the ponies' twitching ears.

"So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her
house, and spending her time with such queer people.  Fancy how
hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'!  She says she
does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying
dreadful people.  But I sometimes think we've always bored her."

Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that
he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice:  "After all, I
wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband."

He burst into a laugh.  "Sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she
turned a puzzled frown on him he added:  "I don't think I ever heard
you say a cruel thing before."

"Cruel?"

"Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a
favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think
people happier in hell."

"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid
tone with which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt
himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands.

They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered
wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the
approach to the Welland villa.  Lights were already shining through its
windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his
father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room,
watch in hand and wearing the pained expression that he had long since
found to be much more efficacious than anger.

The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of
a curious reversal of mood.  There was something about the luxury of
the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged
with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his
system like a narcotic.  The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the
perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually
renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole
chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each
member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised
and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious.  But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he
had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the
blood in his veins.

All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side,
watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen
Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's
trotters.

It has been a year and a half since Newland last saw Ellen. He spends August in Newport with all the other wealthy members of his society. Everyone stands around and watches May shoot an arrow like a goddess at a little contest at the summer party. Later, May decides she wants to visit her Granny and takes the reins of the carriage. Catherine tells them that Ellen is at home but when they call for her the maid says she has already walked toward the sea. Newland is asked to retrieve her but as he approaches her he realizes that he can1t find the power to approach her. He decides that he will watch a boat and see if it passes a rock before Ellen looks at him. The boat passes the rock and Ellen has not turned her gaze away from the sea. So, Newland retreats to the house and pretends he could not find her. That night, as May and Newland travel back to the Welland1s home, May comments that perhaps Ellen would have been happier with her husband. Newland says her comment was cruel, "Watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favorite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don1t think people happier in hell. All night Newland lays awake thinking of Ellen.

It seems in this chapter that Newland is dead. His life is a dream and the characters lack depth and reality. He is a coward now. He cannot even approach Ellen. His soul seems dead. Interestingly, May has retained her godly innocence and beauty while married. Wharton remarks that she is still exactly the same; she like van der Luyden does not age and retains her stature as Diana, the goddess of the hunt and chastity. Catherine is again referred to as a god by the pantheon she has painted on her walls; clearly she recognizes her place as a New York society "god" if she has such a painting on her ceiling, The scene where Newland walks to the ocean front and then decides to let "fate" determine whether he will approach Ellen is one of the most memorable scenes in the book. It shows how Newland no longer wishes to will actions; he sets arbitrary signposts in fate and then allows random chance to affect his decisions. As further evidence of this change in his character, May takes the reigns while in their carriage she directs the course of their lives

A year has passed, and it is now August. Archer and May are in Newport, Rhode Island, to spend their summer vacation. On this day, Archer watches May perform in an archery competition at the Beauforts's country home. Everybody from New York society is there. Archer is surprised to meet the Marchioness there. The Marchioness informs him that she and Madame Olenska are staying with the Blenkers's. The Marchioness also talks about her continued fascination with Dr. Carver. When May steps up to take her turn, Lefferts admires her form but Beaufort dismisses her. Archer is insulted by Beaufort's comment. May wins the competition and receives a shiny diamond pin. May and Archer head over to Mrs. Manson Mingott's after the archery competition. Archer is surprised to learn that Madame Olenska is visiting Mrs. Mingott at the same time. Mrs. Mingott sends Archer to get Madame Olenska, who is taking a walk outside. Archer finds Madame Olenska standing on a the end of a pier, facing the sea with her back to him. Archer decides that if she turns around by the time a boat crosses the Lime Rock lighthouse, he will go down to her. She does not turn around. Archer goes back up to the house with the excuse that he couldn't find Madame Olenska. On the way home, May wonders whether Madame Olenska would be better off with her husband. Archer thinks this idea is cruel. Archer lies awake thinking about Madame Olenska all night.


"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and
incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her
gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:

"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club
on August 25th at 3 o'clock punctually.  To meet Mrs. and the Misses
Blenker.

"Red Gables, Catherine Street.  R. S. V. P."

"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been
necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next,"
Mrs. Welland sighed.  "I suppose he's just discovered the Blenkers."

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society;
and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable
and venerated family tree.  He was, as people said, a man who had had
"every advantage."  His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his
mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and
position, and mutual suitability.  Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had often
remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an
archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did.
But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society
in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right
to expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own
carriage.

No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had
submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the
house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he
travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to
Paris or Italy.  But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently
unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave
one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs,
because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots
and send an unwilling representative.

"It's a wonder," Mrs. Welland remarked, "that they didn't choose the
Cup Race day!  Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for
a black man on the day of Julia Mingott's the dansant?  Luckily this
time there's nothing else going on that I know of--for of course some
of us will have to go."

Mr. Welland sighed nervously.  "'Some of us,' my dear--more than one?
Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour.  I have to be here at
half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to follow
Bencomb's new treatment if I don't do it systematically; and if I join
you later, of course I shall miss my drive."  At the thought he laid
down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his
finely-wrinkled cheek.

"There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife
answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic.  "I have some
cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at
about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that
she hasn't been slighted."  She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter.
"And if Newland's afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you
out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness."

It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours
should be what Mrs. Welland called "provided for."  The melancholy
possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did not
care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the
spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist.  Another of her
principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere
with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of
adjusting this respect for May's independence with the exigency of Mr.
Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity
which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for.

"Of course I'll drive with Papa--I'm sure Newland will find something
to do," May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his
lack of response.  It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland
that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days.
Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof,
when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered
paradoxically:  "Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of
spending it--" and once, when she and May had had to go on a
long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having
lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house.

"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to
complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:  "No; but you see
it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he
reads a book."

"Ah, yes--like his father!" Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an
inherited oddity; and after that the question of Newland's unemployment
was tacitly dropped.

Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May
began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a
tennis match at the Chiverses', or a sail on Julius Beaufort's cutter,
as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion.  "I shall be back by
six, you know, dear: Papa never drives later than that--" and she was
not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about
and driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for
her brougham.  They had been looking for this horse for some time, and
the suggestion was so acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if
to say:  "You see he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of
us."

The idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in
Archer's mind on the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had
first been mentioned; but he had kept it to himself as if there were
something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its
execution.  He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance
a runabout with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still
do their eighteen miles on level roads; and at two o'clock, hastily
deserting the luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and
drove off.

The day was perfect.  A breeze from the north drove little puffs of
white cloud across an ultramarine sky, with a bright sea running under
it.  Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the
stable-lad at the corner of Mill Street Archer turned down the Old
Beach Road and drove across Eastman's Beach.

He had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on
half-holidays at school, he used to start off into the unknown.  Taking
his pair at an easy gait, he counted on reaching the stud-farm, which
was not far beyond Paradise Rocks, before three o'clock; so that, after
looking over the horse (and trying him if he seemed promising) he would
still have four golden hours to dispose of.

As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party he had said to himself
that the Marchioness Manson would certainly come to Newport with the
Blenkers, and that Madame Olenska might again take the opportunity of
spending the day with her grandmother.  At any rate, the Blenker
habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without
indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it.  He was not
sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since
he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted,
irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and
to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the
real one in the summer-house.  The longing was with him day and night,
an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man
for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten.  He could not
see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was
not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her
voice.  He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the
spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it,
the rest of the world might seem less empty.

When he reached the stud-farm a glance showed him that the horse was
not what he wanted; nevertheless he took a turn behind it in order to
prove to himself that he was not in a hurry.  But at three o'clock he
shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-roads
leading to Portsmouth.  The wind had dropped and a faint haze on the
horizon showed that a fog was waiting to steal up the Saconnet on the
turn of the tide; but all about him fields and woods were steeped in
golden light.

He drove past grey-shingled farm-houses in orchards, past hay-fields
and groves of oak, past villages with white steeples rising sharply
into the fading sky; and at last, after stopping to ask the way of some
men at work in a field, he turned down a lane between high banks of
goldenrod and brambles.  At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of
the river; to the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and
maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from
its clapboards.

On the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in
which the New Englander shelters his farming implements and visitors
"hitch" their "teams." Archer, jumping down, led his pair into the
shed, and after tying them to a post turned toward the house.  The
patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field; but to the left
an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled
a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white,
surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but
continued to take ineffectual aim.

Archer leaned for a while against the gate.  No one was in sight, and
not a sound came from the open windows of the house: a grizzled
Newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as
the arrowless Cupid.  It was strange to think that this place of
silence and decay was the home of the turbulent Blenkers; yet Archer
was sure that he was not mistaken.

For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and
gradually falling under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused
himself to the sense of the passing time.  Should he look his fill and
then drive away?  He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the
inside of the house, so that he might picture the room that Madame
Olenska sat in.  There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the
door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed, she was away with the
rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and ask permission to
go into the sitting-room to write a message.

But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden.  As
he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the
summer-house, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol.  The
parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers.  He went into
the summer-house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the
silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some
rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent.  Archer lifted the handle to
his lips.

He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless,
leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the
rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes.  He had always known that
this must happen ...

"Oh, Mr. Archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw
before him the youngest and largest of the Blenker girls, blonde and
blowsy, in bedraggled muslin.  A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed
to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her
half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly.

"Gracious--where did you drop from?  I must have been sound asleep in
the hammock.  Everybody else has gone to Newport.  Did you ring?" she
incoherently enquired.

Archer's confusion was greater than hers.  "I--no--that is, I was just
going to.  I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I
drove over on a chance of finding Mrs. Blenker and your visitors.  But
the house seemed empty--so I sat down to wait."

Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with
increasing interest.  "The house IS empty.  Mother's not here, or the
Marchioness--or anybody but me."  Her glance became faintly
reproachful.  "Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are
giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon?  It was
too unlucky that I couldn't go; but I've had a sore throat, and mother
was afraid of the drive home this evening.  Did you ever know anything
so disappointing?  Of course," she added gaily, "I shouldn't have
minded half as much if I'd known you were coming."

Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer
found the strength to break in:  "But Madame Olenska--has she gone to
Newport too?"

Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise.  "Madame Olenska--didn't you
know she'd been called away?"

"Called away?--"

"Oh, my best parasol!  I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it
matched her ribbons, and the careless thing must have dropped it here.
We Blenkers are all like that ... real Bohemians!"  Recovering the
sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy
dome above her head.  "Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she lets
us call her Ellen, you know.  A telegram came from Boston: she said she
might be gone for two days.  I do LOVE the way she does her hair, don't
you?" Miss Blenker rambled on.

Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been
transparent.  All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its
pinkness above her giggling head.

After a moment he ventured:  "You don't happen to know why Madame
Olenska went to Boston?  I hope it was not on account of bad news?"

Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity.  "Oh, I don't
believe so.  She didn't tell us what was in the telegram.  I think she
didn't want the Marchioness to know.  She's so romantic-looking, isn't
she?  Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons when she reads 'Lady
Geraldine's Courtship'?  Did you never hear her?"

Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.  His whole future
seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless
emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever
to happen.  He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the
tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was
gathering.  It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to
have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink
sunshade was not hers ...

He frowned and hesitated.  "You don't know, I suppose--I shall be in
Boston tomorrow.  If I could manage to see her--"

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile
persisted.  "Oh, of course; how lovely of you!  She's staying at the
Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather."

After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they
exchanged.  He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that
he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before
he drove home.  At length, with his hostess still at his side, he
passed out of range of the wooden Cupid, unfastened his horses and
drove off.  At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the
gate and waving the pink parasol.

The Blenkers, the family where Ellen is staying, decide to throw a garden party which means that none would be home. Strangely, Newland decides to go to the Blenkers1 home with the hope of seeing the place where Ellen has been living. He goes to the home, expecting it to be deserted, and finds one of the Blenker daughters who reveals to him that she has gone to Boston.

Interestingly, the whole world seems quite gray except for a pink parasol that Newland finds at the Blenker1s home  a symbol of exoticism. He picks it up, believing it to be Ellen1s. In his mind, anything exotic and brightly colored must be associated with Ellen. It is very ironic that Newland would feel this way: in the next chapter we see that Ellen1s umbrella is actually gray. Her exoticness has been subdued in the year and a half that Newland has not seen her; the woman of his imagination is now different than the real Ellen. Also, on the way to the Blenker1s, Newland walks past a statue of a cupid. It1s an ineffectual cupid: the cupid has no arrows and no quiver. Newland is very similar to the cupid, metaphorically. Both Newland and Cupid are "archers", and ineffectual ones. Newland, like the broken cupid, is unable to will action

The Wellands receive an invitation from the Sillertons for a party to introduce the Blenkers. Mrs. Welland steps out in order to convey that they are going to decline the invitation, and May goes for a ride with her father. When the day of the Sillerton party arrives, Archer decides to see the Blenkers' home. The Blenkers, the Marchioness, and Madame Olenska will all be in town for the Sillerton party. With the Blenker home empty, Newland can see where Madame Olenska is spending all her time. When he arrives at the Blenker house, it is empty. He starts roaming around the grounds and notices a pink parasol in the summer-house. He thinks it's Ellen's, so he gives the handle a kiss. As he sits in the summer house, he hears a rustle of skirts and thinks it's Ellen. It isn't. It's one of the Blenker girls, and the parasol belongs to her. Archer is disappointed. The Blenker girl tells Archer that Ellen had been called away to Boston the day before on business. Archer politely extricates himself from the conversation and leaves for home.


The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he
emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.  The streets near the station
were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a
shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of
boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.  Even
the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no
excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.  Care-takers in
calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the Common looked
like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.  If Archer
had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not
have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than
this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of
melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and
scrambled eggs.  A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him
ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had
business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and
go on to New York the following evening.  It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back
from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate
had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to
justify his sudden change of plan.  He was even ashamed of the ease
with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an
uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances for
securing his freedom.  But this did not long trouble him, for he was
not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial
Advertiser.  While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came
in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after
all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the
meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up
and went into the writing-room.  There he wrote a few lines, and
ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the
answer.  He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to
calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.

"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his
elbow; and he stammered:  "Out?--" as if it were a word in a strange
language.

He got up and went into the hall.  It must be a mistake: she could not
be out at that hour.  He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why
had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?

He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.  The city
had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a
traveller from distant lands.  For a moment he stood on the door-step
hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House.  What if the
messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?

He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a
tree, he saw her sitting.  She had a grey silk sunshade over her
head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?  As he
approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if
she had nothing else to do.  He saw her drooping profile, and the knot
of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long
wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.  He came a step or
two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.

"Oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on
her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder
and contentment.

"Oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down
at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.

"I'm here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without
knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?"  He had really no
idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across
endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake
her.

"I?  Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head
toward him so that they were face to face.  The words hardly reached
him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not
an echo of it had remained in his memory.  He had not even remembered
that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.

"You do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had
uttered something irrevocable.

"Differently?  No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm
without Nastasia."

"Nastasia; but isn't she with you?"

"No; I'm alone.  For two days it was not worth while to bring her."

"You're alone--at the Parker House?"

She looked at him with a flash of her old malice.  "Does it strike you
as dangerous?"

"No; not dangerous--"

"But unconventional?  I see; I suppose it is."  She considered a
moment.  "I hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so
much more unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her
eyes.  "I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to
me."

Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away.  She had furled her
parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel.  Presently he
came back and stood before her.

"Some one--has come here to meet you?"

"Yes."

"With this offer?"

She nodded.

"And you refused--because of the conditions?"

"I refused," she said after a moment.

He sat down by her again.  "What were the conditions?"

"Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now
and then."

There was another interval of silence.  Archer's heart had slammed
itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a
word.

"He wants you back--at any price?"

"Well--a considerable price.  At least the sum is considerable for me."

He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.

"It was to meet him here that you came?"

She stared, and then burst into a laugh.  "Meet him--my husband?  HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."

"He sent some one?"

"Yes."

"With a letter?"

She shook her head.  "No; just a message.  He never writes.  I don't
think I've had more than one letter from him."  The allusion brought
the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid
blush.

"Why does he never write?"

"Why should he?  What does one have secretaries for?"

The young man's blush deepened.  She had pronounced the word as if it
had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary.  For a
moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask:  "Did he send his
secretary, then?"  But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter
to his wife was too present to him.  He paused again, and then took
another plunge.

"And the person?"--

"The emissary?  The emissary," Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling,
"might, for all I care, have left already; but he has insisted on
waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..."

"And you came out here to think the chance over?"

"I came out to get a breath of air.  The hotel's too stifling.  I'm
taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the
people passing along the path.  Finally she turned her eyes again to
his face and said:  "You're not changed."

He felt like answering:  "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he
stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.

"This is horrible.  Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?
There's a breeze, and it will be cooler.  We might take the steamboat
down to Point Arley."  She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went
on:  "On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat.  My train
doesn't leave till evening: I'm going back to New York.  Why shouldn't
we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out:
"Haven't we done all we could?"

"Oh"--she murmured again.  She stood up and reopened her sunshade,
glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene, and assure
herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.  Then her eyes
returned to his face.  "You mustn't say things like that to me," she
said.

"I'll say anything you like; or nothing.  I won't open my mouth unless
you tell me to.  What harm can it do to anybody?  All I want is to
listen to you," he stammered.

She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain.  "Oh,
don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day!  I want to get you
away from that man.  At what time was he coming?"

Her colour rose again.  "At eleven."

"Then you must come at once."

"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."

"Nor you either--if you do.  I swear I only want to hear about you, to
know what you've been doing.  It's a hundred years since we've met--it
may be another hundred before we meet again."

She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face.  "Why didn't you come
down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny's?" she asked.

"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.  I
swore I wouldn't unless you looked round."  He laughed as the
childishness of the confession struck him.

"But I didn't look round on purpose."

"On purpose?"

"I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies.  So
I went down to the beach."

"To get away from me as far as you could?"

She repeated in a low voice:  "To get away from you as far as I could."

He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction.  "Well, you see
it's no use.  I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I
came here for was just to find you.  But, look here, we must start or
we shall miss our boat."

"Our boat?"  She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled.  "Oh, but I must
go back to the hotel first:  I must leave a note--"

"As many notes as you please.  You can write here." He drew out a
note-case and one of the new stylographic pens.  "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined!  There--steady the
thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second.  They have
to be humoured; wait--"  He banged the hand that held the pen against
the back of the bench.  "It's like jerking down the mercury in a
thermometer: just a trick.  Now try--"

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write.  Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket.  Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.

"I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You
see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the
Parker House before going to the steamboat landing.  They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter.  "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors.  It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.  A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to
sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot
men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went
by.  He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the
people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the
other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the
land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of
hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces.  He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to
the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel
that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face
that was so many more things at once, and things so different.  It was
that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or
worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different.  Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting.  He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him.  At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.

"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side.  They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes.  In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also.  He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him.  In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust.  There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray.  The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun.  Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips.  She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was
struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression.  She seemed to take
their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of
unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.

In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have
to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young
men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.

"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search
of it.  The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming
in at the windows.  It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a
coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a
blueberry pie under a cage.  No more guileless-looking cabinet
particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.  A woman who had
run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony.  By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....

Newland goes to Boston and sends a message to Parker House, where Ellen is staying, but she is not there. He sees her sitting on a bench outside of the building. He says hello and for the first time, he sees a startled look on her face. Previously, the narrator has told us that Ellen never seems to become surprised. She is on a bench thinking if she should return to her husband. He has sent a messenger to bring her back and he is offering a big sum of money. Newland stares at her and says, "Haven1t we done all we could. They take a boat ride together and then have dinner in a private dining hall; they do not touch and barely speak to each other. The silence and isolation is simply enough.

This is the first chapter where Newland finally seems alive again. This scene is desperate, beautiful and simple. Many scenes in the novel are described as tableau they are described like still-life oil paintings. One of the most important tableau is the scene where Newland approaches Ellen. He sees her sitting across the Common and the narrator describes his vision as if she were a beautiful painting. The Scorcese film actually depicts this scene with a real oil painting. Also, it is very ironic that Newland feels as if their little boat trip is "like they were starting on some long voyave from which they might never return. In reality, their trip is nothing like a long voyage. It is just a circular trip through Boston Harbor

In the morning, Archer arrives in Boston and checks into the Somerset House. He sends a message to the Parker House-- where Ellen is staying-- but the messenger returns to say that she has stepped out. Archer goes out to find Ellen. She's sitting on the Common. She informs him that she is in town to meet with her husband's messenger, and she has rejected her husband's proposal that he return all her dowry to her in exchange for her return. Archer invites Ellen to come along with him on a boat ride to Point Arley. After some convincing, she agrees. They go back to Parker House so that Ellen can leave a message for her husband's messenger. He waits outside while Ellen goes inside, but he thinks he recognizes a man's face at the Parker House. Archer and Ellen take a boat out to Point Arley. The restaurant in the inn there is crowded, so they get a private room to themselves for their lunch.


They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between
rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and
yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues
of silence.  Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with
conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her
history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped
hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way
in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty
she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for
the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,
where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and
make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all
her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.

"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver?  I hear he's been
staying with you at the Blenkers'."

She smiled.  "Oh, the Carver danger is over.  Dr. Carver is a very
clever man.  He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is
simply a good advertisement as a convert."

"A convert to what?"

"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.  But, do you know, they
interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody
else's tradition--that I see among our own friends.  It seems stupid to
have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another
country."  She smiled across the table.  "Do you suppose Christopher
Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with
the Selfridge Merrys?"

Archer changed colour.  "And Beaufort--do you say these things to
Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.

"I haven't seen him for a long time.  But I used to; and he
understands."

"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like
Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and
out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung
along the shore.  "We're damnably dull.  We've no character, no colour,
no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"

Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder.  But she sat
silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened
lest she should answer that she wondered too.

At length she said:  "I believe it's because of you."

It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a
tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed.  Archer
reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her
words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive
off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it
were left undisturbed.

"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that
under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate
that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in
comparison.  I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her
troubled brows--"but it seems as if I'd never before understood with
how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures
may be paid."

"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like
retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.

"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with
myself.  For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I
might tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"

Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows.  He interrupted her with a
laugh.  "And what do you make out that you've made of me?"

She paled a little.  "Of you?"

"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine.  I'm
the man who married one woman because another one told him to."

Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush.  "I thought--you promised--you
were not to say such things today."

"Ah--how like a woman!  None of you will ever see a bad business
through!"

She lowered her voice.  "IS it a bad business--for May?"

He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling
in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her
cousin's name.

"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your
own showing?" she insisted.

"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.

"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful
application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missed
things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and
misery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my other
life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took
account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"

He turned around without moving from his place.  "And in that case
there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for
her.

Her eyes were clinging to him desperately.  "Oh, IS there no reason?"

"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage.  My
marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you
here."  She made no answer, and he went on:  "What's the use?  You gave
me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me
to go on with a sham one.  It's beyond human enduring--that's all."

"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes
filling.

Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face
abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.
The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with
the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly
told him.

"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly
downward.

Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any
show of moving.  Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her
bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the
hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the
occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept his
eye on it in order not to look at her face.  Now his imagination spun
about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no
effort to draw nearer.  He had known the love that is fed on caresses
and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not
to be superficially satisfied.  His one terror was to do anything which
might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought,
that he should never again feel quite alone.

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him.  There
they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their
separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world
apart.

"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless
HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU?  crying out to her beneath his words.

She sat motionless, with lowered lids.  "Oh--I shan't go yet!"

"Not yet?  Some time, then?  Some time that you already foresee?"

At that she raised her clearest eyes.  "I promise you: not as long as
you hold out.  Not as long as we can look straight at each other like
this."

He dropped into his chair.  What her answer really said was:  "If you
lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you
know of, and all the temptations you half guess."  He understood it as
clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him
anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred
submission.

"What a life for you!--" he groaned.

"Oh--as long as it's a part of yours."

"And mine a part of yours?"

She nodded.

"And that's to be all--for either of us?"

"Well; it IS all, isn't it?"

At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of her
face.  She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, but
quietly, as though the worst of the task were done and she had only to
wait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands acted
not as a check but as a guide to him.  They fell into his, while her
arms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let her
surrendered face say the rest.

They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a few
moments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all she
had to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered.  He must
do nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their future
in her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.

"Don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as she
drew her hands away; and he answered:  "You won't go back--you won't go
back?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

"I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door and
led the way into the public dining-room.

The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessions
preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach lay
the white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Boston
loomed in a line of haze.

Finally, the "silent spell is broken" and the two break out in conversation. Newland asks why she has not returned to Europe and Ellen says, "Because of you. Then she says one of the most interesting passages in the book: "At least it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. It seems as it I1d never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid for. Ellen thanks Newland for making her the woman she is. And Newland says that he1s not much of a man at all, "I1m the man who married one woman because another one told him to. Ellen continues that it is their sacrifice that has made May1s life so lovely. And, Newland insists that she dare not base her happiness on the success of his marriage since, " gave his firs glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment asked him to go on with a sham one. It1s beyond human enduring. She exclaims, "But I1m enduring it. And the two realize that they will never be alone since they will both silently endure the same pain. Ellen says she will stay in America, as long as they continue to endure; as long as they do not disobey propriety for their love.

This scene is so powerful because, despite the depth of feeling and language, the two never touch. Also interesting is the plays on reality and pretend. What is real. What is the sham life. Newland changes his mind depending on whose company his is in. Also, it is interesting that their misery is all for the sake of preserving May1s happiness. Is May, in a sense, the free individual since all cater to her happiness. Certainly, this may be true since it is her reality that all seem to cater to entertain

In a private room, you'd think that Archer and Ellen would finally express their love for each other. Oh, no. Over lunch, they agree they have to sacrifice their feelings so that everybody else in their respective families doesn't get hurt. Ellen promises not to go back to the Count as long as Archer keeps his promise not to pursue her. They head out.


Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a
tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him.

The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather
ridiculous failure; he had not so much as touched Madame Olenska's hand
with his lips, or extracted one word from her that gave promise of
farther opportunities.  Nevertheless, for a man sick with unsatisfied
love, and parting for an indefinite period from the object of his
passion, he felt himself almost humiliatingly calm and comforted.  It
was the perfect balance she had held between their loyalty to others
and their honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet
tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her tears and
her falterings showed, but resulting naturally from her unabashed
sincerity.  It filled him with a tender awe, now the danger was over,
and made him thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of
playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had tempted him to tempt
her.  Even after they had clasped hands for good-bye at the Fall River
station, and he had turned away alone, the conviction remained with him
of having saved out of their meeting much more than he had sacrificed.

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat alone in the deserted
library, turning and turning over in his thoughts every separate second
of their hours together.  It was clear to him, and it grew more clear
under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide on returning
to Europe--returning to her husband--it would not be because her old
life tempted her, even on the new terms offered.  No: she would go only
if she felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a temptation to
fall away from the standard they had both set up.  Her choice would be
to stay near him as long as he did not ask her to come nearer; and it
depended on himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

In the train these thoughts were still with him.  They enclosed him in
a kind of golden haze, through which the faces about him looked remote
and indistinct: he had a feeling that if he spoke to his
fellow-travellers they would not understand what he was saying.  In
this state of abstraction he found himself, the following morning,
waking to the reality of a stifling September day in New York.  The
heat-withered faces in the long train streamed past him, and he
continued to stare at them through the same golden blur; but suddenly,
as he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came closer
and forced itself upon his consciousness.  It was, as he instantly
recalled, the face of the young man he had seen, the day before,
passing out of the Parker House, and had noted as not conforming to
type, as not having an American hotel face.

The same thing struck him now; and again he became aware of a dim stir
of former associations.  The young man stood looking about him with the
dazed air of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American
travel; then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his hat, and said in
English:  "Surely, Monsieur, we met in London?"

"Ah, to be sure: in London!"  Archer grasped his hand with curiosity
and sympathy.  "So you DID get here, after all?" he exclaimed, casting
a wondering eye on the astute and haggard little countenance of young
Carfry's French tutor.

"Oh, I got here--yes," M. Riviere smiled with drawn lips.  "But not for
long; I return the day after tomorrow." He stood grasping his light
valise in one neatly gloved hand, and gazing anxiously, perplexedly,
almost appealingly, into Archer's face.

"I wonder, Monsieur, since I've had the good luck to run across you, if
I might--"

"I was just going to suggest it: come to luncheon, won't you?  Down
town, I mean: if you'll look me up in my office I'll take you to a very
decent restaurant in that quarter."

M. Riviere was visibly touched and surprised.  "You're too kind.  But I
was only going to ask if you would tell me how to reach some sort of
conveyance.  There are no porters, and no one here seems to listen--"

"I know: our American stations must surprise you.  When you ask for a
porter they give you chewing-gum.  But if you'll come along I'll
extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know."

The young man, after a just perceptible hesitation, replied, with
profuse thanks, and in a tone that did not carry complete conviction,
that he was already engaged; but when they had reached the comparative
reassurance of the street he asked if he might call that afternoon.

Archer, at ease in the midsummer leisure of the office, fixed an hour
and scribbled his address, which the Frenchman pocketed with reiterated
thanks and a wide flourish of his hat.  A horse-car received him, and
Archer walked away.

Punctually at the hour M. Riviere appeared, shaved, smoothed-out, but
still unmistakably drawn and serious.  Archer was alone in his office,
and the young man, before accepting the seat he proffered, began
abruptly: "I believe I saw you, sir, yesterday in Boston."

The statement was insignificant enough, and Archer was about to frame
an assent when his words were checked by something mysterious yet
illuminating in his visitor's insistent gaze.

"It is extraordinary, very extraordinary," M. Riviere continued, "that
we should have met in the circumstances in which I find myself."

"What circumstances?" Archer asked, wondering a little crudely if he
needed money.

M. Riviere continued to study him with tentative eyes.  "I have come,
not to look for employment, as I spoke of doing when we last met, but
on a special mission--"

"Ah--!" Archer exclaimed.  In a flash the two meetings had connected
themselves in his mind.  He paused to take in the situation thus
suddenly lighted up for him, and M. Riviere also remained silent, as if
aware that what he had said was enough.

"A special mission," Archer at length repeated.

The young Frenchman, opening his palms, raised them slightly, and the
two men continued to look at each other across the office-desk till
Archer roused himself to say:  "Do sit down"; whereupon M. Riviere
bowed, took a distant chair, and again waited.

"It was about this mission that you wanted to consult me?" Archer
finally asked.

M. Riviere bent his head.  "Not in my own behalf: on that score I--I
have fully dealt with myself.  I should like--if I may--to speak to you
about the Countess Olenska."

Archer had known for the last few minutes that the words were coming;
but when they came they sent the blood rushing to his temples as if he
had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket.

"And on whose behalf," he said, "do you wish to do this?"

M. Riviere met the question sturdily.  "Well--I might say HERS, if it
did not sound like a liberty.  Shall I say instead: on behalf of
abstract justice?"

Archer considered him ironically.  "In other words: you are Count
Olenski's messenger?"

He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M. Riviere's sallow
countenance.  "Not to YOU, Monsieur.  If I come to you, it is on quite
other grounds."

"What right have you, in the circumstances, to BE on any other ground?"
Archer retorted.  "If you're an emissary you're an emissary."

The young man considered.  "My mission is over: as far as the Countess
Olenska goes, it has failed."

"I can't help that," Archer rejoined on the same note of irony.

"No: but you can help--"  M. Riviere paused, turned his hat about in
his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back
at Archer's face.  "You can help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it
equally a failure with her family."

Archer pushed back his chair and stood up.  "Well--and by God I will!"
he exclaimed.  He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down
wrathfully at the little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had
risen, was still an inch or two below the line of Archer's eyes.

M. Riviere paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion
could hardly turn.

"Why the devil," Archer explosively continued, "should you have
thought--since I suppose you're appealing to me on the ground of my
relationship to Madame Olenska--that I should take a view contrary to
the rest of her family?"

The change of expression in M. Riviere's face was for a time his only
answer.  His look passed from timidity to absolute distress: for a
young man of his usually resourceful mien it would have been difficult
to appear more disarmed and defenceless.  "Oh, Monsieur--"

"I can't imagine," Archer continued, "why you should have come to me
when there are others so much nearer to the Countess; still less why
you thought I should be more accessible to the arguments I suppose you
were sent over with."

M. Riviere took this onslaught with a disconcerting humility.  "The
arguments I want to present to you, Monsieur, are my own and not those
I was sent over with."

"Then I see still less reason for listening to them."

M. Riviere again looked into his hat, as if considering whether these
last words were not a sufficiently broad hint to put it on and be gone.
Then he spoke with sudden decision.  "Monsieur--will you tell me one
thing?  Is it my right to be here that you question?  Or do you perhaps
believe the whole matter to be already closed?"

His quiet insistence made Archer feel the clumsiness of his own
bluster.  M. Riviere had succeeded in imposing himself:  Archer,
reddening slightly, dropped into his chair again, and signed to the
young man to be seated.

"I beg your pardon: but why isn't the matter closed?"

M. Riviere gazed back at him with anguish.  "You do, then, agree with
the rest of the family that, in face of the new proposals I have
brought, it is hardly possible for Madame Olenska not to return to her
husband?"

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed; and his visitor gave out a low murmur of
confirmation.

"Before seeing her, I saw--at Count Olenski's request--Mr. Lovell
Mingott, with whom I had several talks before going to Boston.  I
understand that he represents his mother's view; and that Mrs. Manson
Mingott's influence is great throughout her family."

Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding
precipice.  The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in
these negotiations, and even from the knowledge that they were on foot,
caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was
learning.  He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult
him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no
longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension, a
remark of May's during their drive home from Mrs. Manson Mingott's on
the day of the Archery Meeting:  "Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be
happier with her husband."

Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant
exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named
Madame Olenska to him.  Her careless allusion had no doubt been the
straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been
reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted
from their counsels.  He admired the tribal discipline which made May
bow to this decision.  She would not have done so, he knew, had her
conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view that
Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a
separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with
Newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the
most fundamental things for granted.

Archer looked up and met his visitor's anxious gaze.  "Don't you know,
Monsieur--is it possible you don't know--that the family begin to doubt
if they have the right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband's
last proposals?"

"The proposals you brought?"

"The proposals I brought."

It was on Archer's lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not
know was no concern of M. Riviere's; but something in the humble and
yet courageous tenacity of M. Riviere's gaze made him reject this
conclusion, and he met the young man's question with another.  "What is
your object in speaking to me of this?"

He had not to wait a moment for the answer.  "To beg you, Monsieur--to
beg you with all the force I'm capable of--not to let her go back.--Oh,
don't let her!" M. Riviere exclaimed.

Archer looked at him with increasing astonishment.  There was no
mistaking the sincerity of his distress or the strength of his
determination: he had evidently resolved to let everything go by the
board but the supreme need of thus putting himself on record.  Archer
considered.

"May I ask," he said at length, "if this is the line you took with the
Countess Olenska?"

M. Riviere reddened, but his eyes did not falter.  "No, Monsieur: I
accepted my mission in good faith.  I really believed--for reasons I
need not trouble you with--that it would be better for Madame Olenska
to recover her situation, her fortune, the social consideration that
her husband's standing gives her."

"So I supposed: you could hardly have accepted such a mission
otherwise."

"I should not have accepted it."

"Well, then--?"  Archer paused again, and their eyes met in another
protracted scrutiny.

"Ah, Monsieur, after I had seen her, after I had listened to her, I
knew she was better off here."

"You knew--?"

"Monsieur, I discharged my mission faithfully: I put the Count's
arguments, I stated his offers, without adding any comment of my own.
The Countess was good enough to listen patiently; she carried her
goodness so far as to see me twice; she considered impartially all I
had come to say.  And it was in the course of these two talks that I
changed my mind, that I came to see things differently."

"May I ask what led to this change?"

"Simply seeing the change in HER," M. Riviere replied.

"The change in her?  Then you knew her before?"

The young man's colour again rose.  "I used to see her in her husband's
house.  I have known Count Olenski for many years.  You can imagine
that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission."

Archer's gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office, rested
on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the
President of the United States.  That such a conversation should be
going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his
rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.

"The change--what sort of a change?"

"Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!"  M. Riviere paused.  "Tenez--the
discovery, I suppose, of what I'd never thought of before: that she's
an American.  And that if you're an American of HER kind--of your
kind--things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least
put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take--become
unthinkable, simply unthinkable.  If Madame Olenska's relations
understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning
would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard
her husband's wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing
for domestic life."  M. Riviere paused, and then added:  "Whereas it's
far from being as simple as that."

Archer looked back to the President of the United States, and then down
at his desk and at the papers scattered on it.  For a second or two he
could not trust himself to speak.  During this interval he heard M.
Riviere's chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had
risen.  When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved
as himself.

"Thank you," Archer said simply.

"There's nothing to thank me for, Monsieur: it is I, rather--"  M.
Riviere broke off, as if speech for him too were difficult.  "I should
like, though," he continued in a firmer voice, "to add one thing.  You
asked me if I was in Count Olenski's employ.  I am at this moment: I
returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity
such as may happen to any one who has persons, ill and older persons,
dependent on him.  But from the moment that I have taken the step of
coming here to say these things to you I consider myself discharged,
and I shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons.  That's
all, Monsieur."

M. Riviere bowed and drew back a step.

"Thank you," Archer said again, as their hands met.

Newland wanders back to New York in a "golden haze. On leaving the train station he runs into a gentleman he had seen near Ellen1s Boston residence, the Parker House. They agree to meet later in Newland1s office. His name is M. Riviere and his first comment to Newland is, "I believe I saw you yesterday in Boston. Riviere reveals that he had been the messenger sent by Olenski to Ellen. Newland is, at first very angry. But, then Riviere reveals that he, personally, believes that the worst thing for Ellen would be for her to return. He reasons that she is an American and believes certain things that are commonplace in Europe to be unthinkable in her mind as an American. Riviere reveals to Newland that he is quitting his job with Olenski.

This chapter reveals, objectively, that Newland is right in pleading with Ellen to stay. It is the right thing for her and it has been confirmed, now, by an objective source. Since the narration is so close to Newland, in that it reflects his thoughts, prior to this moment, it is impossible for the reader to know whether or not Europe is a more appropriate home for Ellen. But, since Riviere has no motives to leave Ellen in America  we can believe, for once, that Ellen belongs in America. It is also interesting that the ties of society are so tight for May; she will not reveal to her own husband the negotiations concerning Ellen because others have deemed it better that she not reveal this to him

Archer and Ellen return to Boston. Archer heads back to New York City. Once there, he bumps into none other than Monsieur Riviere on the street. He invites Monsieur Riviere to meet him at his office for lunch. When Monsieur Riviere arrives at Archer's office, he confesses that he saw Archer in Boston. It turns out that Monsieur Riviere is the Count's messenger. Before he had gone up to Boston, Monsieur Riviere had stopped in New York City first to consult with Mr. Lovell Mingott to see how the Mingotts felt about Madame Olenska's separation from her husband. They want her to return to her husband. Now that he's returned from Boston after seeing the Countess, Monsieur Riviere disagrees, and believes that it would be awful for the Countess to return to the Count. He believes she has changed and turned into a complete American who would find the Count's corrupt European ways too awful. Monsieur Riviere then informs Archer that he will tell the Count his opinion and resign. Archer and Riviere shake hands and leave on friendly terms.