The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust.  All the old
ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing
ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered
the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.

Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry
and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace
Church.

The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was
in sight; but there was sure to be a considerable interval of
adjustment and consultation in the lobby, where the bridesmaids were
already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms.  During this
unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness,
was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled
company; and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as
through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York
wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.
Everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put
it--in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the
flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms
had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the
same labyrinth.

So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations.
The bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley
had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire
sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye
scarf-pin; Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording
of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and
ex-lady-loves; the fees for the Bishop and the Rector were safely in
the pocket of his best man; his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson
Mingott's, where the wedding-breakfast was to take place, and so were
the travelling clothes into which he was to change; and a private
compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young
couple to their unknown destination--concealment of the spot in which
the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of
the prehistoric ritual.

"Got the ring all right?" whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who
was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight
of his responsibility.

Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make:
with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey
waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its place; then,
resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with
black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door
of the church.

Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone
vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at
which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel
step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.

"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the
same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the
Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same
towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the
same diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable
proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.

After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar
countenances in the first rows; the women's sharp with curiosity and
excitement, the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on
their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the
wedding-breakfast.

"Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's," the bridegroom could
fancy Reggie Chivers saying.  "But I'm told that Lovell Mingott
insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if
one can only get at it."  And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding
with authority:  "My dear fellow, haven't you heard?  It's to be served
at small tables, in the new English fashion."

Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother,
who had entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden's arm, sat
weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's
ermine muff.

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

On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved
for the families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the
women with his arrogant stare.  Beside him sat his wife, all silvery
chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon, Lawrence
Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the
invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony.

Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts's keen eyes would discover in
the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had
once thought such questions important.  The things that had filled his
days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of
mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever
understood.  A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents
should be "shown" had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and
it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work
themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the
matter should have been decided (in the negative) by Mrs. Welland's
saying, with indignant tears:  "I should as soon turn the reporters
loose in my house."  Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite
and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when
everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had
seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.

"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living
somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."

"THERE THEY COME!" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom
knew better.

The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr.
Brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent
character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene
before marshalling his forces.  The door was softly shut again; then
after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran
through the church:  "The family!"

Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son.  Her large pink
face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale
blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met
with general approval; but before she had settled herself with a
stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's the spectators were
craning their necks to see who was coming after her.  Wild rumours had
been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in
spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at
the ceremony; and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting
character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk
up the nave and squeeze into a seat.  It was known that she had
insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of
taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space
between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging,
and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the
plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and
sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.

The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her
relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person
who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the
iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the
curbstone.  The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the
bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood
outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even
old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the
possibility.  "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT
IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was
hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled
with a collective shudder.  The ancestress had had to give in; but her
concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast
should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington Square
connection said) with the Wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to
have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end
of nowhere.

Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons
a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would
appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature
when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law.  Mrs.
Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies
of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but
once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's
non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black Chantilly
over lilac satin, with a bonnet of Parma violets, formed the happiest
contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum-colour.  Far different was the
impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr.
Mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and
floating scarves; and as this last apparition glided into view Archer's
heart contracted and stopped beating.

He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in
Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her
niece, Madame Olenska.  It was generally understood that their abrupt
departure was due to Madame Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from
the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded
in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the
circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for
the wedding.  For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora's
fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little
procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had
taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves
together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre,
were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby.

"Newland--I say: SHE'S HERE!" the best man whispered.

Archer roused himself with a start.

A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating,
for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the
Bishop, the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about
the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr symphony
were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride.

Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he
imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task.  The
music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of
tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of Mrs.
Archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory
murmur of the Rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink
bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and
sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and
meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his
brain.

"My God," he thought, "HAVE I got the ring?"--and once more he went
through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture.

Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her
that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened
himself and smiled into her eyes.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the Rector began ...

The ring was on her hand, the Bishop's benediction had been given, the
bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and
the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the
Mendelssohn March, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever
emerged upon New York.

"Your arm--I SAY, GIVE HER YOUR ARM!" young Newland nervously hissed;
and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the
unknown.  What was it that had sent him there, he wondered?  Perhaps
the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark
coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as
belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the
person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were
becoming subject to hallucinations.

And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried
forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to
them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with
big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the
far end of the canvas tunnel.

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

"Darling!" Archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before
him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his
voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully:  "Yes, of course I thought
I'd lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a
bridegroom didn't go through that.  But you DID keep me waiting, you
know!  I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen."

She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her
arms about his neck.  "But none ever CAN happen now, can it, Newland,
as long as we two are together?"

Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the
young couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on
their travelling-clothes, descend the wide Mingott stairs between
laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham
under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was
still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last
weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and
settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had
already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new
dressing-bag from London.

The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal
of the bridal couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of
spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to
escape the usual "bridal suite" in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel,
had accepted with an equal alacrity.

May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly
amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where
their mysterious retreat was situated.  It was thought "very English"
to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of
distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant
wedding of the year; but where the house was no one was permitted to
know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the
knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously:  "Ah, they didn't
tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.

Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off
the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of
spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected.  May was still, in
look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes
with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as
impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher.  At
first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an
inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil
unawareness.  She was alone for the first time with her husband; but
her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday.  There was no
one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and
the culminating "lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement
and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup
person, like a "married woman," in fact.

It was wonderful that--as he had learned in the Mission garden at St.
Augustine--such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of
imagination.  But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him
by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience
had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go
through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as
it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their
transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than
a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue
or a Greek goddess.  The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might
have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her
look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor
dull, but only primitive and pure.  In the thick of this meditation
Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a
stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and
of Granny Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it.

May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject.  "I was surprised,
though--weren't you?--that aunt Medora came after all.  Ellen wrote
that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do
wish it had been she who had recovered!  Did you see the exquisite old
lace she sent me?"

He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had
somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.

"Yes--I--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly,
and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his
carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.

"Aren't you tired?  It will be good to have some tea when we
arrive--I'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready," he
rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly
to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the
Beauforts had sent, and which "went" so perfectly with uncle Lovell
Mingott's trays and side-dishes.

In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and
they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.

"Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens--they've sent their man
over from Skuytercliff to meet us," Archer exclaimed, as a sedate
person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.

"I'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary, "that a little accident
has occurred at the Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.  It
happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this
morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's
house ready.  It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir;
and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be
exactly the same as if you'd been at Rhinebeck."

Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more
apologetic accents:  "It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure
you--" and May's eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed
silence:  "The same as Rhinebeck?  The Patroon's house?  But it will be
a hundred thousand times better--won't it, Newland?  It's too dear and
kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."

And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their
shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly:
"Only fancy, I've never been inside it--have you?  The van der Luydens
show it to so few people.  But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and
she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it's the only
house she's seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly
happy in."

"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband
gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile:  "Ah, it's just our luck
beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"

"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and
his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental
Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people
whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously
avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not
"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in
foreign countries.

Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so
unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances
of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,
that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a
word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and
railway-stations.  Their own compatriots--save those previously known
or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced
disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at
Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage
(whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known
to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle
of liniment.  The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--had
been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who
never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately
able to produce the required remedy.

Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were
travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies,
who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid
helped to nurse the invalid back to health.

When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle again.  Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would
have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of
a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service.
But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown,
and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves
linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had
been so kind at Botzen.  With touching fidelity they seized every
chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their
continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding
out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the
States.  The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey,
whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by
two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in
Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness
Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits.
As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the
tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought
"only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies,
who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under
glass.  And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England,
Mrs. Archer's last word had been:  "You must take May to see Mrs.
Carfry."

Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but
Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them
an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer
was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

"It's all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them.  But I shall feel
so shy among a lot of people I've never met.  And what shall I wear?"

Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.  She looked
handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.  The moist English air seemed
to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight
hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow
of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

"Wear, dearest?  I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris
last week."

"Yes, of course.  I meant to say that I shan't know WHICH to wear."
She pouted a little.  "I've never dined out in London; and I don't want
to be ridiculous."

He tried to enter into her perplexity.  "But don't Englishwomen dress
just like everybody else in the evening?"

"Newland!  How can you ask such funny questions?  When they go to the
theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."

"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle won't.  They'll wear caps like my mother's--and
shawls; very soft shawls."

"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"

"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly
developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.

She pushed back her chair with a sigh.  "That's dear of you, Newland;
but it doesn't help me much."

He had an inspiration.  "Why not wear your wedding-dress?  That can't
be wrong, can it?"

"Oh, dearest!  If I only had it here!  But it's gone to Paris to be
made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."

"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up.  "Look here--the fog's lifting.
If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a
glimpse of the pictures."

The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months'
wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely
summarised as "blissful."

They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not
been able to picture his wife in that particular setting.  Her own
inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for
mountaineering in July and swimming in August.  This plan they
punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and
August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which
some one had recommended as quaint and quiet.  Once or twice, in the
mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; and
May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied:
"It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to
be in New York."

But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had
expected.  She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an
enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand
at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got
back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered
HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she
looked forward to sailing.

In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and
she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret
to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage.  It
was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as
all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice
the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest
notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that
May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be
to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.  Her innate dignity
would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might
even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it
altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good.  But
with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers
such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly
outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him
made that unthinkable.  Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be
loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of
the same virtues.

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind.  If her
simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed
and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were
on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of
all his old traditions and reverences.

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,
though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at
once how they would fall into place in their proper setting.  He had no
fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within
it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife
would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.
And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would
be filled.

All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive
from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister
lived.  Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends'
hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always
travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty
unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings.  Once only, just
after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of
queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in
palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the
fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun
in the world, as unreal as a carnival.  These queer cosmopolitan women,
deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need
of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers
and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their
confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up
among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics,
to detain his imagination long.  To introduce his wife into such a
society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no
other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of
St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had
said:  "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American would
have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was
without a sequel.  They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt,
the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had
purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their
arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to
these unknown relatives.

"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at
this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said
to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her
sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her
to the London grime.

"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,
with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck
again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American
women for the social advantages of dress.

"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown,
and their defiance of it."  And he understood for the first time the
earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her
hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and
ordering her extensive wardrobe.

He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small
one.  Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long
chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was
her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a
small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,
pronouncing a French name as she did so.

Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a
swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more
voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he
perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an
extreme and infantile shyness.

"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes
implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was
calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms.  But beauty, even
when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and
the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their
desire to put her at her ease.

In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing
affair.  Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her
ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her
references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to
admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee.  The Vicar soon
abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and
accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until
the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the
drawing-room.

The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a
meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed
off to bed.  But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,
and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his
last symposium with Ned Winsett.  The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had
been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for
Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman.  Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who
had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he
went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without
one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts.  He was a man
of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called
him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense
expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his
animation.

His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and
it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an
insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,
then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after
other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into
tutoring English youths in Switzerland.  Before that, however, he had
lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by
Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's
house.  He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious
(having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was
apparent that his literary ambitions had failed.  His situation, in
fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who
loved ideas need hunger mentally.  As it was precisely of that love
that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of
vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so
richly in his poverty.

"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's
intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,
one's critical independence?  It was because of that that I abandoned
journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private
secretaryship.  There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a
soi.  And when one hears good talk one can join in it without
compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer
it inwardly.  Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.  And so I have never
regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms
of the same self-abdication."  He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he
lit another cigarette.  "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life
in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?  But, after
all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to
grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as
chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge.  Do you
suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in
New York?"

Archer looked at him with startled eyes.  New York, for a young man who
had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of
ideas the only one worth living!  He continued to stare at M.  Riviere
perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and
advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.

"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered,
utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could
offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only
necessity.

A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere's sallow skin.  "I--I thought it
your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he
rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of
having asked a favour, he went on hastily:  "One throws out random
suggestions--more to one's self than to others.  In reality, I see no
immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a
trace of constraint:  "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be
taking you upstairs."

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.  His
hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first
impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was
beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately
yield to their first impulses.

"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good
talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in
the hansom.

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had
read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the
key to them.

"The little Frenchman?  Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned
coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at
having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French
tutor.  The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment
ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of what
was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands.  If May's
parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have
offered them something more substantial than a parson and a
schoolmaster.

But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

"Common--common WHERE?" he queried; and she returned with unusual
readiness:  "Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room.  Those
people are always awkward in society.  But then," she added
disarmingly, "I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."

Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use
of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to
dwell on the things he disliked in her.  After all, her point of view
had always been the same.  It was that of all the people he had grown
up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.
Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at
life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the
nice.

"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May
echoed, bewildered:  "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"

"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.
But I did rather want another talk with him.  He's looking for a job in
New York."

Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that
she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."

"A job in New York?  What sort of a job?  People don't have French
tutors: what does he want to do?"

"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband
retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh.  "Oh,
Newland, how funny!  Isn't that FRENCH?"

On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her
refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Riviere.  Another
after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of
New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit
M. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.

He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many
problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the
hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge
in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the
most difficult in marriage.  "After that I suppose we shall have pretty
nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the
worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very
angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.
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.

Book Two opens on Archer's wedding day. The predictably ritualistic ceremony passes before Archer as a complete blur, and amidst the marriage vows he thinks hazily of Ellen. After the wedding, May and Archer set out by train for their bridal suite in the country. On the train, May is all cheerfulness and bright chatter. Newland is again impressed by her naivete and complete lack of imagination. When she mentions Ellen's name, Archer finds himself flustered. Arriving at their destination, they find that their bridal suite is unavailable and that the van der Luydens have instead arranged for them to spend the night in their little ancestral cottage where Newland met with Ellen that previous winter. After their stay in the cottage, the Archers travel to Europe for their honeymoon. May is concerned that she will be required to visit Archer's foreign acquaintances. Her anxiety, we learn, is typical of the Old New York crowd, whose fear of Europeans causes them to travel abroad in a state of isolation. Archer, meanwhile, abandons his attempts to educate May; for "there was no use in trying to educate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free." He reconciles himself to the fact that his married life will still allow him an active intellectual life outside of the home. As for his own feelings towards European culture, he decides that it is too different from his own way of life to capture his imagination for very long. Archer does convince May to attend a dinner party hosted by some family friends in London. At the dinner, he meets a young Frenchman who serves as the family's tutor. Archer is intrigued by the man's vivid conversation and his conviction that being intellectually free is worth living in poverty. After dinner, he mentions to May that he would like to invite the Frenchman to dinner. May dismisses this idea with laughter, and Archer sees that this is how disagreements between them will be solved in the future. After their three-month honeymoon, the Archers rejoin Old New York society in Newport for the annual archery competition. By now, married life has become predictable but placid for Archer. Ellen has been relegated to the back of his memory, remaining there only as a "plaintive ghost" of his past. At the archery competition, May wins first prize, and the Archers visit Mrs. Mingott at her near-by summer home to show her May's prize. At Mrs. Mingott's, they learn that Ellen, who has since moved from New York to Washington, is currently visiting Newport with Medora. Mrs. Mingott sends Archer to find her. He sees her near the shore but decides he will not approach her unless she turns around. She doesn't, and he returns alone.

In the transition from Book One to Book Two of The Age of Innocence, Wharton dramatically breaks the flow of the novel's narrative. At the end of Book One, we leave Archer just as he has heard from May that their wedding date will be pushed forward. Book Two opens on Archer's wedding day, as he waits for his bride's carriage to arrive at the church. There is little connection between these two scenes; nothing is mentioned about the preparation for the wedding or Archer's jitters as he prepares to marry a woman he feels is unsuited for him. Because of this jerky transition, the reader feels slightly bewildered by the rush of all the wedding events. We can empathize with Archer, who suddenly finds himself helpless in the midst of this life-changing experience. Because Archer feels so unable to stop or control his own wedding, he feels that it is inevitable. In addition to portraying the wedding as an unstoppable force, Wharton also compares it to a primitive ritual. Each small act involved with the marriage follows a certain code or tradition. For example, Wharton describes the act of keeping secret the location of a new couple's first night together as a long- held custom, remarking that it is "one of the most sacred taboos of the prehistoric ritual. " In this way, Wharton mocks the beloved traditions of New York society as silly and almost superstitious. She also wryly comments on the fact that an argument over the displaying of wedding gifts causes May's mother to burst into tears of indignation. Archer is amazed that "grown-up people should work themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles." Archer's esteem of May continues to lessen after the wedding ceremony. In the past, he had consoled himself by noting that May's beauty and innocence compensated for her lack of interest in intellectual ideas. Nor Archer cannot even see her beauty as a redeeming quality. He notes that with her serene expression, May looks like "a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess." It is significant that Archer sees her as a representation and not an individual person. Like a statue of "Civic Virtue," May is the creation of her society, a representation of many of Old New York's values. Unfortunately, she appears to be little more than that. Archer worries that May's innocence is "a curtain dropped before an emptiness." He fears that behind May's sweet demeanor and correct manners, she is an essentially hollow person. In London, Archer is introduced to a person who is the very opposite of May. The French tutor he meets at a dinner party is neither fashionable nor aristocratic. But despite his common-looking exterior, he proves to be a vivid and insightful conversationalist. At dinner, he speaks to Archer about the vital importance of maintaining one's own ideas and opinions. For the tutor, preserving one's right to think freely is worth the price of living in poverty. Archer, filled with envy and admiration, wishes to invite the tutor to dinner for further conversation. But May convinces Archer not to invite him. In this way, she not only refuses to consider ideas outside her normal experiences, she seems bent on depriving Archer of such intellectual discussions as well. At the end of Chapter 21, Wharton presents a variation on a symbol we have seen earlier in the novel. After Archer sets off to fetch Ellen on her grandmother's orders, he finds her at the shore with her back turned. The image instantly reminds Archer of the scene at the theater in which the two lovers part. This scene now takes on a more personal meaning for him. As Archer turns to leave without saying a word, we are left with a sense of finality. Archer has failed to take advantage of this rare opportunity to speak alone with Ellen. Although no goodbye has been said, it is as if, with Archer's actions, he has decided not to pursue the relationship further.