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.
Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its
shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of
window-curtains.

By the first of November this household ritual was over, and society
had begun to look about and take stock of itself.  By the fifteenth the
season was in full blast, Opera and theatres were putting forth their
new attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and dates for
dances being fixed.  And punctually at about this time Mrs. Archer
always said that New York was very much changed.

Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, she was
able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace
each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up
between the ordered rows of social vegetables.  It had been one of the
amusements of Archer's youth to wait for this annual pronouncement of
his mother's, and to hear her enumerate the minute signs of
disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked.  For New York, to
Mrs. Archer's mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and
in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his
judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations
of the ladies.  But even he never denied that New York had changed; and
Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year of his marriage, was
himself obliged to admit that if it had not actually changed it was
certainly changing.

These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs. Archer's Thanksgiving
dinner.  At the date when she was officially enjoined to give thanks
for the blessings of the year it was her habit to take a mournful
though not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there was to
be thankful for.  At any rate, not the state of society; society, if it
could be said to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call down
Biblical imprecations--and in fact, every one knew what the Reverend
Dr. Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse
25) for his Thanksgiving sermon.  Dr. Ashmore, the new Rector of St.
Matthew's, had been chosen because he was very "advanced": his sermons
were considered bold in thought and novel in language.  When he
fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its "trend";
and to Mrs. Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel
herself part of a community that was trending.

"There's no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right: there IS a marked trend,"
she said, as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack
in a house.

"It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving," Miss Jackson
opined; and her hostess drily rejoined:  "Oh, he means us to give
thanks for what's left."

Archer had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his
mother's; but this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he
listened to an enumeration of the changes, that the "trend" was visible.

"The extravagance in dress--" Miss Jackson began.  "Sillerton took me
to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane
Merry's dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even
that had had the front panel changed.  Yet I know she got it out from
Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make
over her Paris dresses before she wears them."

"Ah, Jane Merry is one of US," said Mrs. Archer sighing, as if it were
not such an enviable thing to be in an age when ladies were beginning
to flaunt abroad their Paris dresses as soon as they were out of the
Custom House, instead of letting them mellow under lock and key, in the
manner of Mrs. Archer's contemporaries.

"Yes; she's one of the few.  In my youth," Miss Jackson rejoined, "it
was considered vulgar to dress in the newest fashions; and Amy
Sillerton has always told me that in Boston the rule was to put away
one's Paris dresses for two years.  Old Mrs. Baxter Pennilow, who did
everything handsomely, used to import twelve a year, two velvet, two
satin, two silk, and the other six of poplin and the finest cashmere.
It was a standing order, and as she was ill for two years before she
died they found forty-eight Worth dresses that had never been taken out
of tissue paper; and when the girls left off their mourning they were
able to wear the first lot at the Symphony concerts without looking in
advance of the fashion."

"Ah, well, Boston is more conservative than New York; but I always
think it's a safe rule for a lady to lay aside her French dresses for
one season," Mrs. Archer conceded.

"It was Beaufort who started the new fashion by making his wife clap
her new clothes on her back as soon as they arrived: I must say at
times it takes all Regina's distinction not to look like ... like ..."
Miss Jackson glanced around the table, caught Janey's bulging gaze, and
took refuge in an unintelligible murmur.

"Like her rivals," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson, with the air of
producing an epigram.

"Oh,--" the ladies murmured; and Mrs. Archer added, partly to distract
her daughter's attention from forbidden topics:  "Poor Regina!  Her
Thanksgiving hasn't been a very cheerful one, I'm afraid.  Have you
heard the rumours about Beaufort's speculations, Sillerton?"

Mr. Jackson nodded carelessly.  Every one had heard the rumours in
question, and he scorned to confirm a tale that was already common
property.

A gloomy silence fell upon the party.  No one really liked Beaufort,
and it was not wholly unpleasant to think the worst of his private
life; but the idea of his having brought financial dishonour on his
wife's family was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his enemies.
Archer's New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations; but in
business matters it exacted a limpid and impeccable honesty.  It was a
long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but
every one remembered the social extinction visited on the heads of the
firm when the last event of the kind had happened.  It would be the
same with the Beauforts, in spite of his power and her popularity; not
all the leagued strength of the Dallas connection would save poor
Regina if there were any truth in the reports of her husband's unlawful
speculations.

The talk took refuge in less ominous topics; but everything they
touched on seemed to confirm Mrs. Archer's sense of an accelerated
trend.

"Of course, Newland, I know you let dear May go to Mrs. Struthers's
Sunday evenings--" she began; and May interposed gaily:  "Oh, you know,
everybody goes to Mrs. Struthers's now; and she was invited to Granny's
last reception."

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions:
conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all
good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.
There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally
she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it
was impregnable?  Once people had tasted of Mrs. Struthers's easy
Sunday hospitality they were not likely to sit at home remembering that
her champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.

"I know, dear, I know," Mrs. Archer sighed.  "Such things have to be, I
suppose, as long as AMUSEMENT is what people go out for; but I've never
quite forgiven your cousin Madame Olenska for being the first person to
countenance Mrs. Struthers."

A sudden blush rose to young Mrs. Archer's face; it surprised her
husband as much as the other guests about the table.  "Oh, ELLEN--" she
murmured, much in the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which
her parents might have said:  "Oh, THE BLENKERS--."

It was the note which the family had taken to sounding on the mention
of the Countess Olenska's name, since she had surprised and
inconvenienced them by remaining obdurate to her husband's advances;
but on May's lips it gave food for thought, and Archer looked at her
with the sense of strangeness that sometimes came over him when she was
most in the tone of her environment.

His mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to atmosphere, still
insisted:  "I've always thought that people like the Countess Olenska,
who have lived in aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up
our social distinctions, instead of ignoring them."

May's blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed to have a
significance beyond that implied by the recognition of Madame Olenska's
social bad faith.

"I've no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners," said Miss Jackson
tartly.

"I don't think Ellen cares for society; but nobody knows exactly what
she does care for," May continued, as if she had been groping for
something noncommittal.

"Ah, well--" Mrs. Archer sighed again.

Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good
graces of her family.  Even her devoted champion, old Mrs. Manson
Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her
husband.  The Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval aloud:
their sense of solidarity was too strong.  They had simply, as Mrs.
Welland said, "let poor Ellen find her own level"--and that,
mortifyingly and incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the
Blenkers prevailed, and "people who wrote" celebrated their untidy
rites.  It was incredible, but it was a fact, that Ellen, in spite of
all her opportunities and her privileges, had become simply "Bohemian."
The fact enforced the contention that she had made a fatal mistake in
not returning to Count Olenski.  After all, a young woman's place was
under her husband's roof, especially when she had left it in
circumstances that ... well ... if one had cared to look into them ...

"Madame Olenska is a great favourite with the gentlemen," said Miss
Sophy, with her air of wishing to put forth something conciliatory when
she knew that she was planting a dart.

"Ah, that's the danger that a young woman like Madame Olenska is always
exposed to," Mrs. Archer mournfully agreed; and the ladies, on this
conclusion, gathered up their trains to seek the carcel globes of the
drawing-room, while Archer and Mr. Sillerton Jackson withdrew to the
Gothic library.

Once established before the grate, and consoling himself for the
inadequacy of the dinner by the perfection of his cigar, Mr. Jackson
became portentous and communicable.

"If the Beaufort smash comes," he announced, "there are going to be
disclosures."

Archer raised his head quickly: he could never hear the name without
the sharp vision of Beaufort's heavy figure, opulently furred and shod,
advancing through the snow at Skuytercliff.

"There's bound to be," Mr. Jackson continued, "the nastiest kind of a
cleaning up.  He hasn't spent all his money on Regina."

"Oh, well--that's discounted, isn't it?  My belief is he'll pull out
yet," said the young man, wanting to change the subject.

"Perhaps--perhaps.  I know he was to see some of the influential people
today.  Of course," Mr. Jackson reluctantly conceded, "it's to be hoped
they can tide him over--this time anyhow.  I shouldn't like to think of
poor Regina's spending the rest of her life in some shabby foreign
watering-place for bankrupts."

Archer said nothing.  It seemed to him so natural--however tragic--that
money ill-gotten should be cruelly expiated, that his mind, hardly
lingering over Mrs. Beaufort's doom, wandered back to closer questions.
What was the meaning of May's blush when the Countess Olenska had been
mentioned?

Four months had passed since the midsummer day that he and Madame
Olenska had spent together; and since then he had not seen her.  He
knew that she had returned to Washington, to the little house which she
and Medora Manson had taken there: he had written to her once--a few
words, asking when they were to meet again--and she had even more
briefly replied: "Not yet."

Since then there had been no farther communication between them, and he
had built up within himself a kind of sanctuary in which she throned
among his secret thoughts and longings.  Little by little it became the
scene of his real life, of his only rational activities; thither he
brought the books he read, the ideas and feelings which nourished him,
his judgments and his visions.  Outside it, in the scene of his actual
life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency,
blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view
as an absent-minded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own
room.  Absent--that was what he was: so absent from everything most
densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him
to find they still imagined he was there.

He became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to
farther revelations.

"I don't know, of course, how far your wife's family are aware of what
people say about--well, about Madame Olenska's refusal to accept her
husband's latest offer."

Archer was silent, and Mr. Jackson obliquely continued: "It's a
pity--it's certainly a pity--that she refused it."

"A pity?  In God's name, why?"

Mr. Jackson looked down his leg to the unwrinkled sock that joined it
to a glossy pump.

"Well--to put it on the lowest ground--what's she going to live on now?"

"Now--?"

"If Beaufort--"

Archer sprang up, his fist banging down on the black walnut-edge of the
writing-table.  The wells of the brass double-inkstand danced in their
sockets.

"What the devil do you mean, sir?"

Mr. Jackson, shifting himself slightly in his chair, turned a tranquil
gaze on the young man's burning face.

"Well--I have it on pretty good authority--in fact, on old Catherine's
herself--that the family reduced Countess Olenska's allowance
considerably when she definitely refused to go back to her husband; and
as, by this refusal, she also forfeits the money settled on her when
she married--which Olenski was ready to make over to her if she
returned--why, what the devil do YOU mean, my dear boy, by asking me
what I mean?" Mr. Jackson good-humouredly retorted.

Archer moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over to knock his ashes
into the grate.

"I don't know anything of Madame Olenska's private affairs; but I don't
need to, to be certain that what you insinuate--"

"Oh, I don't: it's Lefferts, for one," Mr. Jackson interposed.

"Lefferts--who made love to her and got snubbed for it!" Archer broke
out contemptuously.

"Ah--DID he?" snapped the other, as if this were exactly the fact he
had been laying a trap for.  He still sat sideways from the fire, so
that his hard old gaze held Archer's face as if in a spring of steel.

"Well, well: it's a pity she didn't go back before Beaufort's cropper,"
he repeated.  "If she goes NOW, and if he fails, it will only confirm
the general impression: which isn't by any means peculiar to Lefferts,
by the way."

"Oh, she won't go back now: less than ever!"  Archer had no sooner said
it than he had once more the feeling that it was exactly what Mr.
Jackson had been waiting for.

The old gentleman considered him attentively.  "That's your opinion,
eh?  Well, no doubt you know.  But everybody will tell you that the few
pennies Medora Manson has left are all in Beaufort's hands; and how the
two women are to keep their heads above water unless he does, I can't
imagine.  Of course, Madame Olenska may still soften old Catherine,
who's been the most inexorably opposed to her staying; and old
Catherine could make her any allowance she chooses.  But we all know
that she hates parting with good money; and the rest of the family have
no particular interest in keeping Madame Olenska here."

Archer was burning with unavailing wrath: he was exactly in the state
when a man is sure to do something stupid, knowing all the while that
he is doing it.

He saw that Mr. Jackson had been instantly struck by the fact that
Madame Olenska's differences with her grandmother and her other
relations were not known to him, and that the old gentleman had drawn
his own conclusions as to the reasons for Archer's exclusion from the
family councils.  This fact warned Archer to go warily; but the
insinuations about Beaufort made him reckless.  He was mindful,
however, if not of his own danger, at least of the fact that Mr.
Jackson was under his mother's roof, and consequently his guest.  Old
New York scrupulously observed the etiquette of hospitality, and no
discussion with a guest was ever allowed to degenerate into a
disagreement.

"Shall we go up and join my mother?" he suggested curtly, as Mr.
Jackson's last cone of ashes dropped into the brass ashtray at his
elbow.

On the drive homeward May remained oddly silent; through the darkness,
he still felt her enveloped in her menacing blush.  What its menace
meant he could not guess: but he was sufficiently warned by the fact
that Madame Olenska's name had evoked it.

They went upstairs, and he turned into the library.  She usually
followed him; but he heard her passing down the passage to her bedroom.

"May!" he called out impatiently; and she came back, with a slight
glance of surprise at his tone.

"This lamp is smoking again; I should think the servants might see that
it's kept properly trimmed," he grumbled nervously.

"I'm so sorry: it shan't happen again," she answered, in the firm
bright tone she had learned from her mother; and it exasperated Archer
to feel that she was already beginning to humour him like a younger Mr.
Welland.  She bent over to lower the wick, and as the light struck up
on her white shoulders and the clear curves of her face he thought:
"How young she is!  For what endless years this life will have to go
on!"

He felt, with a kind of horror, his own strong youth and the bounding
blood in his veins.  "Look here," he said suddenly, "I may have to go
to Washington for a few days--soon; next week perhaps."

Her hand remained on the key of the lamp as she turned to him slowly.
The heat from its flame had brought back a glow to her face, but it
paled as she looked up.

"On business?" she asked, in a tone which implied that there could be
no other conceivable reason, and that she had put the question
automatically, as if merely to finish his own sentence.

"On business, naturally.  There's a patent case coming up before the
Supreme Court--"  He gave the name of the inventor, and went on
furnishing details with all Lawrence Lefferts's practised glibness,
while she listened attentively, saying at intervals:  "Yes, I see."

"The change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished;
"and you must be sure to go and see Ellen," she added, looking him
straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone
she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome
family duty.

It was the only word that passed between them on the subject; but in
the code in which they had both been trained it meant:  "Of course you
understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen,
and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to
return to her husband.  I also know that, for some reason you have not
chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all
the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in
approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies
us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr.
Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has
made you so irritable....  Hints have indeed not been wanting; but
since you appear unwilling to take them from others, I offer you this
one myself, in the only form in which well-bred people of our kind can
communicate unpleasant things to each other: by letting you understand
that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are
perhaps going there expressly for that purpose; and that, since you are
sure to see her, I wish you to do so with my full and explicit
approval--and to take the opportunity of letting her know what the
course of conduct you have encouraged her in is likely to lead to."

Her hand was still on the key of the lamp when the last word of this
mute message reached him.  She turned the wick down, lifted off the
globe, and breathed on the sulky flame.

"They smell less if one blows them out," she explained, with her bright
housekeeping air.  On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.

Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort's
situation.  They were not definite, but they were hopeful.  It was
generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case
of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening,
when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a
new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of relief.

New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities.
So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who
broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even
Beaufort and Beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this
principle.  But to be obliged to offer them up would be not only
painful but inconvenient.  The disappearance of the Beauforts would
leave a considerable void in their compact little circle; and those who
were too ignorant or too careless to shudder at the moral catastrophe
bewailed in advance the loss of the best ball-room in New York.

Archer had definitely made up his mind to go to Washington.  He was
waiting only for the opening of the law-suit of which he had spoken to
May, so that its date might coincide with that of his visit; but on the
following Tuesday he learned from Mr. Letterblair that the case might
be postponed for several weeks.  Nevertheless, he went home that
afternoon determined in any event to leave the next evening.  The
chances were that May, who knew nothing of his professional life, and
had never shown any interest in it, would not learn of the
postponement, should it take place, nor remember the names of the
litigants if they were mentioned before her; and at any rate he could
no longer put off seeing Madame Olenska.  There were too many things
that he must say to her.

On the Wednesday morning, when he reached his office, Mr. Letterblair
met him with a troubled face.  Beaufort, after all, had not managed to
"tide over"; but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he
had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the
bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to
predominate.  In consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its
doors were likely to close before the day was over.  The ugliest things
were being said of Beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre, and his failure
promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall
Street.

The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and
incapacitated.  "I've seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as
this.  Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another.  And what
will be done about Mrs. Beaufort?  What CAN be done about her?  I pity
Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age, there's no
knowing what effect this affair may have on her.  She always believed
in Beaufort--she made a friend of him!  And there's the whole Dallas
connection: poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you.  Her
only chance would be to leave her husband--yet how can any one tell her
so?  Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been
blind to his private weaknesses."

There was a knock, and Mr. Letterblair turned his head sharply.  "What
is it?  I can't be disturbed."

A clerk brought in a letter for Archer and withdrew.  Recognising his
wife's hand, the young man opened the envelope and read:  "Won't you
please come up town as early as you can?  Granny had a slight stroke
last night.  In some mysterious way she found out before any one else
this awful news about the bank.  Uncle Lovell is away shooting, and the
idea of the disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a
temperature and can't leave his room.  Mamma needs you dreadfully, and
I do hope you can get away at once and go straight to Granny's."

Archer handed the note to his senior partner, and a few minutes later
was crawling northward in a crowded horse-car, which he exchanged at
Fourteenth Street for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth
Avenue line.  It was after twelve o'clock when this laborious vehicle
dropped him at old Catherine's.  The sitting-room window on the ground
floor, where she usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure
of her daughter, Mrs. Welland, who signed a haggard welcome as she
caught sight of Archer; and at the door he was met by May.  The hall
wore the unnatural appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly
invaded by illness: wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs, a
doctor's bag and overcoat were on the table, and beside them letters
and cards had already piled up unheeded.

May looked pale but smiling: Dr. Bencomb, who had just come for the
second time, took a more hopeful view, and Mrs. Mingott's dauntless
determination to live and get well was already having an effect on her
family.  May led Archer into the old lady's sitting-room, where the
sliding doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut, and the
heavy yellow damask portieres dropped over them; and here Mrs. Welland
communicated to him in horrified undertones the details of the
catastrophe.  It appeared that the evening before something dreadful
and mysterious had happened.  At about eight o'clock, just after Mrs.
Mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she always played after
dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly veiled that the
servants did not immediately recognise her had asked to be received.

The butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting-room
door, announcing:  "Mrs. Julius Beaufort"--and had then closed it again
on the two ladies.  They must have been together, he thought, about an
hour.  When Mrs. Mingott's bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped
away unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone
in her great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room.
She seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete
control of her body and brain.  The mulatto maid put her to bed,
brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid everything straight in the
room, and went away; but at three in the morning the bell rang again,
and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted summons (for old
Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their mistress sitting
up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and one little
hand hanging limp from its huge arm.

The stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to
articulate and to make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's
first visit she had begun to regain control of her facial muscles.  But
the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the indignation
when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases that
Regina Beaufort had come to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up
her husband, see them through--not to "desert" them, as she called
it--in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their
monstrous dishonour.

"I said to her:  'Honour's always been honour, and honesty honesty, in
Manson Mingott's house, and will be till I'm carried out of it feet
first,'" the old woman had stammered into her daughter's ear, in the
thick voice of the partly paralysed.  "And when she said:  'But my
name, Auntie--my name's Regina Dallas,' I said:  'It was Beaufort when
he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's
covered you with shame.'"

So much, with tears and gasps of horror, Mrs. Welland imparted,
blanched and demolished by the unwonted obligation of having at last to
fix her eyes on the unpleasant and the discreditable.  "If only I could
keep it from your father-in-law: he always says: 'Augusta, for pity's
sake, don't destroy my last illusions'--and how am I to prevent his
knowing these horrors?" the poor lady wailed.

"After all, Mamma, he won't have SEEN them," her daughter suggested;
and Mrs. Welland sighed:  "Ah, no; thank heaven he's safe in bed.  And
Dr. Bencomb has promised to keep him there till poor Mamma is better,
and Regina has been got away somewhere."

Archer had seated himself near the window and was gazing out blankly at
the deserted thoroughfare.  It was evident that he had been summoned
rather for the moral support of the stricken ladies than because of any
specific aid that he could render.  Mr. Lovell Mingott had been
telegraphed for, and messages were being despatched by hand to the
members of the family living in New York; and meanwhile there was
nothing to do but to discuss in hushed tones the consequences of
Beaufort's dishonour and of his wife's unjustifiable action.

Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who had been in another room writing notes,
presently reappeared, and added her voice to the discussion.  In THEIR
day, the elder ladies agreed, the wife of a man who had done anything
disgraceful in business had only one idea: to efface herself, to
disappear with him.  "There was the case of poor Grandmamma Spicer;
your great-grandmother, May.  Of course," Mrs. Welland hastened to add,
"your great-grandfather's money difficulties were private--losses at
cards, or signing a note for somebody--I never quite knew, because
Mamma would never speak of it.  But she was brought up in the country
because her mother had to leave New York after the disgrace, whatever
it was: they lived up the Hudson alone, winter and summer, till Mamma
was sixteen.  It would never have occurred to Grandmamma Spicer to ask
the family to 'countenance' her, as I understand Regina calls it;
though a private disgrace is nothing compared to the scandal of ruining
hundreds of innocent people."

"Yes, it would be more becoming in Regina to hide her own countenance
than to talk about other people's," Mrs. Lovell Mingott agreed.  "I
understand that the emerald necklace she wore at the Opera last Friday
had been sent on approval from Ball and Black's in the afternoon.  I
wonder if they'll ever get it back?"

Archer listened unmoved to the relentless chorus.  The idea of absolute
financial probity as the first law of a gentleman's code was too deeply
ingrained in him for sentimental considerations to weaken it.  An
adventurer like Lemuel Struthers might build up the millions of his
Shoe Polish on any number of shady dealings; but unblemished honesty
was the noblesse oblige of old financial New York.  Nor did Mrs.
Beaufort's fate greatly move Archer.  He felt, no doubt, more sorry for
her than her indignant relatives; but it seemed to him that the tie
between husband and wife, even if breakable in prosperity, should be
indissoluble in misfortune.  As Mr. Letterblair had said, a wife's
place was at her husband's side when he was in trouble; but society's
place was not at his side, and Mrs. Beaufort's cool assumption that it
was seemed almost to make her his accomplice.  The mere idea of a
woman's appealing to her family to screen her husband's business
dishonour was inadmissible, since it was the one thing that the Family,
as an institution, could not do.

The mulatto maid called Mrs. Lovell Mingott into the hall, and the
latter came back in a moment with a frowning brow.

"She wants me to telegraph for Ellen Olenska.  I had written to Ellen,
of course, and to Medora; but now it seems that's not enough.  I'm to
telegraph to her immediately, and to tell her that she's to come alone."

The announcement was received in silence.  Mrs. Welland sighed
resignedly, and May rose from her seat and went to gather up some
newspapers that had been scattered on the floor.

"I suppose it must be done," Mrs. Lovell Mingott continued, as if
hoping to be contradicted; and May turned back toward the middle of the
room.

"Of course it must be done," she said.  "Granny knows what she wants,
and we must carry out all her wishes.  Shall I write the telegram for
you, Auntie?  If it goes at once Ellen can probably catch tomorrow
morning's train."  She pronounced the syllables of the name with a
peculiar clearness, as if she had tapped on two silver bells.

"Well, it can't go at once.  Jasper and the pantry-boy are both out
with notes and telegrams."

May turned to her husband with a smile.  "But here's Newland, ready to
do anything.  Will you take the telegram, Newland?  There'll be just
time before luncheon."

Archer rose with a murmur of readiness, and she seated herself at old
Catherine's rosewood "Bonheur du Jour," and wrote out the message in
her large immature hand.  When it was written she blotted it neatly and
handed it to Archer.

"What a pity," she said, "that you and Ellen will cross each other on
the way!--Newland," she added, turning to her mother and aunt, "is
obliged to go to Washington about a patent law-suit that is coming up
before the Supreme Court.  I suppose Uncle Lovell will be back by
tomorrow night, and with Granny improving so much it doesn't seem right
to ask Newland to give up an important engagement for the firm--does
it?"

She paused, as if for an answer, and Mrs. Welland hastily declared:
"Oh, of course not, darling.  Your Granny would be the last person to
wish it."  As Archer left the room with the telegram, he heard his
mother-in-law add, presumably to Mrs. Lovell Mingott:  "But why on
earth she should make you telegraph for Ellen Olenska--" and May's
clear voice rejoin:  "Perhaps it's to urge on her again that after all
her duty is with her husband."

The outer door closed on Archer and he walked hastily away toward the
telegraph office.

Despite his failure to extract any more than a tenuous promise from Ellen, Archer is nonetheless comforted by their agreement and returns the next day to New York. As he arrives at the train station, he is surprised to meet the French tutor he had met abroad in London, and he invites the young man to call on him that afternoon. In Archer's office, the tutor relates that he had seen Archer the day before in Boston. He informs Archer that he was there to speak with Ellen on behalf of Count Olenski. Despite his connection with the Count, however, the tutor firmly believes that Ellen should not return to him and asks Archer to persuade the Mingott family to change their mind regarding the issue. At this moment, Archer realizes that he has been excluded from the family's negotiations over Ellen's fate because they saw that he was not on their side. He asks the tutor why he feels Ellen should not accept the offer. The tutor explains that Ellen has changed, that she has become more American, and that going back to her old European life would be unbearable for her now that she has adapted to New York customs. We learn from the tutor's speech that he has known the Count and Ellen for many years. This leads Archer to wonder if he is perhaps the secretary rumored to have had an affair with Ellen. Autumn soon arrives, and with it Archer's mother's usual complaints that society has changed in recent years for the worse. Evidence of this societal decay is the extravagant new fall fashions, Beaufort's rumored recent financial problems following unlawful speculations, and the success of Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's vulgar Sunday evening parties. At Thanksgiving dinner, the conversation turns to Ellen Olenska, who was one of the first to attend the Struthers parties. Ellen has again disappointed the family by refusing to return to her husband. Remaining in Washington with Medora, she is now considered to be a hopeless case. Archer himself has not heard from her for several months. When Sillerton Jackson makes the waggish suggestion that Ellen may lose some financial assistance should Beaufort lose his fortune, Archer angrily responds to this implication of adultery. After his outburst, he realizes that he has exposed his ignorance of the family's decisions regarding Ellen. Unbeknownst to him, they have greatly reduced her allowance upon her refusal to return to her husband, leaving her next to penniless. Upon returning home, Archer invents an excuse to tell May to justify his going to Washington the next day. While May wishes him a good journey, her eyes indicate that she is quite aware that Archer means to see Ellen there. Archer's plans to leave for Washington are thwarted by the collapse of Beaufort's business dealings, which promise to be the worst disaster Wall Street has ever seen. News soon reaches Archer that Mrs. Mingott has had a stroke. When he reaches her home, he is informed of the cause of her stroke. Mrs. Beaufort had been to see Mrs. Mingott the night before and had asked her the impossible: that the family support Beaufort through his financial collapse. Mrs. Mingott had refused, but the shock of Mrs. Beaufort's effrontery was great enough to induce a stroke. Mrs. Mingott requests to see Ellen. May exclaims that it is a pity that her train to New York will cross Archer's train bound for Washington on the way.

Upon talking with the French tutor, Archer comes to the painful realization that the Mingott family has decided to exclude him from their discussions of Ellen. This act of exclusion is upsetting to Archer because it forces him to realize the power of the group and his own relative weakness. Earlier in the novel, Archer felt that he could challenge the family's decisions by voicing his own different opinions on Ellen's marital difficulties. But by cutting him completely out of the discussion, the family denies him not only the power to object, but they also deny him the knowledge of Ellen's problems. To avoid any unpleasant debate, the Mingotts choose to keep Archer in the dark. On this subject, he is left in a state of innocence. For a man already frustrated with the suffocating confines of his environment, the awareness that his family can control what he knows is very disheartening. As for the Mingott family, they themselves choose only to acknowledge certain aspects of Ellen's situation. They wish for her to return to her husband because they feel that Ellen will be less a subject of gossip if she returns to a stable married life. But by insisting that she return to her husband, the Mingotts are overlooking some very important facts. Namely, that Ellen does not want to return to her philandering husband and that she will be unhappy in such an unhealthy relationship. In speaking to Archer, the French tutor explains that if Ellen's family knew how unpleasant things would be for her with her husband, they would not ask her to return to him. But are the Mingotts truly unaware of the negative aspects of Ellen's marriage? Or are they purposefully overlooking the unpleasant realities? Perhaps, as Archer figures, the Mingotts would rather see Ellen as "an unhappy wife than a separated one," because married life gives a more proper appearance. With the reappearance of the French tutor, Wharton returns to an issue that was mentioned earlier in the novel but not resolved: Ellen Olenska's supposed affair. Her husband the Count had claimed in his letter that her lover was his secretary. Realizing that the French tutor was sent by Count Olenski, Archer wonders if he is that supposed lover. But even here, Wharton's narration is not omniscient; she does not tell the reader whether or not the tutor is her lover or whether Ellen had a lover at all. We are left knowing as little about the truth as Archer. As a result, it is difficult for us to judge Ellen's actions. We are also left wondering how much May really knows about Archer's feelings for Ellen. When he gives her an excuse for going to Washington, she simply smiles and encourages him to greet Ellen. But Wharton includes a long paragraph in which she interprets what May is really saying with her few words and smile. In this imagined monologue, May indicates that she knows there has been some talk about Archer and Ellen and that the only proper thing for her to do is to pretend that she is unaware of it. By explicitly telling him to greet Ellen, she reinforces her appearance of ignorance.