Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to her cousin Mrs.
Archer's narrative.

It was all very well to tell yourself in advance that Mrs. van der
Luyden was always silent, and that, though non-committal by nature and
training, she was very kind to the people she really liked.  Even
personal experience of these facts was not always a protection from the
chill that descended on one in the high-ceilinged white-walled Madison
Avenue drawing-room, with the pale brocaded armchairs so obviously
uncovered for the occasion, and the gauze still veiling the ormolu
mantel ornaments and the beautiful old carved frame of Gainsborough's
"Lady Angelica du Lac."

Mrs. van der Luyden's portrait by Huntington (in black velvet and
Venetian point) faced that of her lovely ancestress.  It was generally
considered "as fine as a Cabanel," and, though twenty years had elapsed
since its execution, was still "a perfect likeness." Indeed the Mrs.
van der Luyden who sat beneath it listening to Mrs. Archer might have
been the twin-sister of the fair and still youngish woman drooping
against a gilt armchair before a green rep curtain.  Mrs. van der
Luyden still wore black velvet and Venetian point when she went into
society--or rather (since she never dined out) when she threw open her
own doors to receive it.  Her fair hair, which had faded without
turning grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her
forehead, and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was
only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait
had been painted.  She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having
been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a
perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep
for years a rosy life-in-death.

Like all his family, he esteemed and admired Mrs. van der Luyden; but
he found her gentle bending sweetness less approachable than the
grimness of some of his mother's old aunts, fierce spinsters who said
"No" on principle before they knew what they were going to be asked.

Mrs. van der Luyden's attitude said neither yes nor no, but always
appeared to incline to clemency till her thin lips, wavering into the
shadow of a smile, made the almost invariable reply:  "I shall first
have to talk this over with my husband."

She and Mr. van der Luyden were so exactly alike that Archer often
wondered how, after forty years of the closest conjugality, two such
merged identities ever separated themselves enough for anything as
controversial as a talking-over.  But as neither had ever reached a
decision without prefacing it by this mysterious conclave, Mrs. Archer
and her son, having set forth their case, waited resignedly for the
familiar phrase.

Mrs. van der Luyden, however, who had seldom surprised any one, now
surprised them by reaching her long hand toward the bell-rope.

"I think," she said, "I should like Henry to hear what you have told
me."

A footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: "If Mr. van der Luyden
has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to
come."

She said "reading the newspaper" in the tone in which a Minister's wife
might have said:  "Presiding at a Cabinet meeting"--not from any
arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a life-time, and the
attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider Mr. van
der Luyden's least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.

Her promptness of action showed that she considered the case as
pressing as Mrs. Archer; but, lest she should be thought to have
committed herself in advance, she added, with the sweetest look:
"Henry always enjoys seeing you, dear Adeline; and he will wish to
congratulate Newland."

The double doors had solemnly reopened and between them appeared Mr.
Henry van der Luyden, tall, spare and frock-coated, with faded fair
hair, a straight nose like his wife's and the same look of frozen
gentleness in eyes that were merely pale grey instead of pale blue.

Mr. van der Luyden greeted Mrs. Archer with cousinly affability,
proffered to Newland low-voiced congratulations couched in the same
language as his wife's, and seated himself in one of the brocade
armchairs with the simplicity of a reigning sovereign.

"I had just finished reading the Times," he said, laying his long
finger-tips together.  "In town my mornings are so much occupied that I
find it more convenient to read the newspapers after luncheon."

"Ah, there's a great deal to be said for that plan--indeed I think my
uncle Egmont used to say he found it less agitating not to read the
morning papers till after dinner," said Mrs. Archer responsively.

"Yes: my good father abhorred hurry.  But now we live in a constant
rush," said Mr. van der Luyden in measured tones, looking with pleasant
deliberation about the large shrouded room which to Archer was so
complete an image of its owners.

"But I hope you HAD finished your reading, Henry?" his wife interposed.

"Quite--quite," he reassured her.

"Then I should like Adeline to tell you--"

"Oh, it's really Newland's story," said his mother smiling; and
proceeded to rehearse once more the monstrous tale of the affront
inflicted on Mrs. Lovell Mingott.

"Of course," she ended, "Augusta Welland and Mary Mingott both felt
that, especially in view of Newland's engagement, you and Henry OUGHT
TO KNOW."

"Ah--" said Mr. van der Luyden, drawing a deep breath.

There was a silence during which the tick of the monumental ormolu
clock on the white marble mantelpiece grew as loud as the boom of a
minute-gun.  Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded
figures, seated side by side in a kind of viceregal rigidity,
mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled
them to wield, when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity
and seclusion, digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of
Skuytercliff, and playing Patience together in the evenings.

Mr. van der Luyden was the first to speak.

"You really think this is due to some--some intentional interference of
Lawrence Lefferts's?" he enquired, turning to Archer.

"I'm certain of it, sir.  Larry has been going it rather harder than
usual lately--if cousin Louisa won't mind my mentioning it--having
rather a stiff affair with the postmaster's wife in their village, or
some one of that sort; and whenever poor Gertrude Lefferts begins to
suspect anything, and he's afraid of trouble, he gets up a fuss of this
kind, to show how awfully moral he is, and talks at the top of his
voice about the impertinence of inviting his wife to meet people he
doesn't wish her to know.  He's simply using Madame Olenska as a
lightning-rod; I've seen him try the same thing often before."

"The LEFFERTSES!--" said Mrs. van der Luyden.

"The LEFFERTSES!--" echoed Mrs. Archer.  "What would uncle Egmont have
said of Lawrence Lefferts's pronouncing on anybody's social position?
It shows what Society has come to."

"We'll hope it has not quite come to that," said Mr. van der Luyden
firmly.

"Ah, if only you and Louisa went out more!" sighed Mrs. Archer.

But instantly she became aware of her mistake.  The van der Luydens
were morbidly sensitive to any criticism of their secluded existence.
They were the arbiters of fashion, the Court of last Appeal, and they
knew it, and bowed to their fate.  But being shy and retiring persons,
with no natural inclination for their part, they lived as much as
possible in the sylvan solitude of Skuytercliff, and when they came to
town, declined all invitations on the plea of Mrs. van der Luyden's
health.

Newland Archer came to his mother's rescue.  "Everybody in New York
knows what you and cousin Louisa represent.  That's why Mrs. Mingott
felt she ought not to allow this slight on Countess Olenska to pass
without consulting you."

Mrs. van der Luyden glanced at her husband, who glanced back at her.

"It is the principle that I dislike," said Mr. van der Luyden.  "As
long as a member of a well-known family is backed up by that family it
should be considered--final."

"It seems so to me," said his wife, as if she were producing a new
thought.

"I had no idea," Mr. van der Luyden continued, "that things had come to
such a pass."  He paused, and looked at his wife again.  "It occurs to
me, my dear, that the Countess Olenska is already a sort of
relation--through Medora Manson's first husband.  At any rate, she will
be when Newland marries."  He turned toward the young man.  "Have you
read this morning's Times, Newland?"

"Why, yes, sir," said Archer, who usually tossed off half a dozen
papers with his morning coffee.

Husband and wife looked at each other again.  Their pale eyes clung
together in prolonged and serious consultation; then a faint smile
fluttered over Mrs. van der Luyden's face.  She had evidently guessed
and approved.

Mr. van der Luyden turned to Mrs. Archer.  "If Louisa's health allowed
her to dine out--I wish you would say to Mrs. Lovell Mingott--she and I
would have been happy to--er--fill the places of the Lawrence
Leffertses at her dinner."  He paused to let the irony of this sink in.
"As you know, this is impossible."  Mrs. Archer sounded a sympathetic
assent.  "But Newland tells me he has read this morning's Times;
therefore he has probably seen that Louisa's relative, the Duke of St.
Austrey, arrives next week on the Russia.  He is coming to enter his
new sloop, the Guinevere, in next summer's International Cup Race; and
also to have a little canvasback shooting at Trevenna."  Mr. van der
Luyden paused again, and continued with increasing benevolence:
"Before taking him down to Maryland we are inviting a few friends to
meet him here--only a little dinner--with a reception afterward.  I am
sure Louisa will be as glad as I am if Countess Olenska will let us
include her among our guests."  He got up, bent his long body with a
stiff friendliness toward his cousin, and added:  "I think I have
Louisa's authority for saying that she will herself leave the
invitation to dine when she drives out presently: with our cards--of
course with our cards."

Mrs. Archer, who knew this to be a hint that the seventeen-hand
chestnuts which were never kept waiting were at the door, rose with a
hurried murmur of thanks.  Mrs. van der Luyden beamed on her with the
smile of Esther interceding with Ahasuerus; but her husband raised a
protesting hand.

"There is nothing to thank me for, dear Adeline; nothing whatever.
This kind of thing must not happen in New York; it shall not, as long
as I can help it," he pronounced with sovereign gentleness as he
steered his cousins to the door.

Two hours later, every one knew that the great C-spring barouche in
which Mrs. van der Luyden took the air at all seasons had been seen at
old Mrs. Mingott's door, where a large square envelope was handed in;
and that evening at the Opera Mr. Sillerton Jackson was able to state
that the envelope contained a card inviting the Countess Olenska to the
dinner which the van der Luydens were giving the following week for
their cousin, the Duke of St. Austrey.

Some of the younger men in the club box exchanged a smile at this
announcement, and glanced sideways at Lawrence Lefferts, who sat
carelessly in the front of the box, pulling his long fair moustache,
and who remarked with authority, as the soprano paused:  "No one but
Patti ought to attempt the Sonnambula."

Mrs. Archer and Newland discuss the problem of Ellen1s reception with Mrs. Van der Luyden, who insists that she must discuss the problem with her husband. Mrs. Archer insists that Larry Lefferts discouraged everyone from coming in order to distract attention from his own affairs with women; Mr. Van der Luyden says that as long as the Mingotts have accepted Ellen into their family then everyone else should accept her into society as well. Since he and his wife cannot attend the dinner in the Leffertses place, due to Louisa1s health, they instead invite Ellen to a reception dinner with the Duke of St. Austrey. This reception is of such high prestige that it exonerates Ellen of any marks on her reputation.

This chapter is interesting because it reveals the many levels of stratification in New York society. When Ellen is "judged" by the Leffertses, Mrs. Archer can appeal to a higher authority: the van der Luydens, who are indisputably of better reputation. This chapter gives a deep sense of the politics of the times. Also interesting is the description of the "immortal" nature of the van der Luydens. Mrs. van der Luyden is described as "looking exactly like her portrait;" like Catherine, earlier, van der Luyden never ages. She seems "rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death. There are many reasons why Wharton chooses to describe her this way. Perhaps Wharton is trying to draw a dichotomy between the "mortals" and the immortals". The mortals are people like Ellen Olenska, Ned Winsett and regular common folks. These people are alive; they age and they are relatively left out of the scheme of the great New York Society. People who are "immortal" are the van der Luydens, the Mingotts, the Archers, the Wellands, the Leffertses. These families are like the gods of the New York pantheon. In making clear this distinction, Wharton can play with the problem of categorizing Newland. Is he a mortal or an immortal. Where does he fit in. Another reason why these great families may be described as "alive but dead" is that they are quietly losing power as time moves on. Wharton is clear in telling us that the great American aristocracies are dying dinosaurs in the early twentieth century. By describing them as, already in a sense, dead, she can drive home the point that much of this codified society is already beginning to die out

Mrs. Archer and Newland pay a visit to Mrs. van der Luyden in order to explain how everybody snubbed the Lovell Mingotts's invitation to meet Countess Olenska. Mrs. van der Luyden calls in her husband to weigh in on the matter. Mr. van der Luyden is appalled to learn that Lawrence Lefferts seems to have persuaded everybody to snub Countess Olenska. Mr. van der Luyden stands on the principle that if Countess Olenska is backed up by her family, no one has a right to snub her. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden decide to invite Countess Olenska to a dinner at their place to meet their cousin, the Duke of St. Austrey. Such an invitation is a high honor and would cement her position in society. Later that evening at the opera, Mr. Sillerton Jackson shares with everyone the news that Countess Olenska has been invited to the van der Luydens's. Lefferts is miffed.


It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had "lost
her looks."

She had appeared there first, in Newland Archer's boyhood, as a
brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten, of whom people said that
she "ought to be painted." Her parents had been continental wanderers,
and after a roaming babyhood she had lost them both, and been taken in
charge by her aunt, Medora Manson, also a wanderer, who was herself
returning to New York to "settle down."

Poor Medora, repeatedly widowed, was always coming home to settle down
(each time in a less expensive house), and bringing with her a new
husband or an adopted child; but after a few months she invariably
parted from her husband or quarrelled with her ward, and, having got
rid of her house at a loss, set out again on her wanderings.  As her
mother had been a Rushworth, and her last unhappy marriage had linked
her to one of the crazy Chiverses, New York looked indulgently on her
eccentricities; but when she returned with her little orphaned niece,
whose parents had been popular in spite of their regrettable taste for
travel, people thought it a pity that the pretty child should be in
such hands.

Every one was disposed to be kind to little Ellen Mingott, though her
dusky red cheeks and tight curls gave her an air of gaiety that seemed
unsuitable in a child who should still have been in black for her
parents.  It was one of the misguided Medora's many peculiarities to
flout the unalterable rules that regulated American mourning, and when
she stepped from the steamer her family were scandalised to see that
the crape veil she wore for her own brother was seven inches shorter
than those of her sisters-in-law, while little Ellen was in crimson
merino and amber beads, like a gipsy foundling.

But New York had so long resigned itself to Medora that only a few old
ladies shook their heads over Ellen's gaudy clothes, while her other
relations fell under the charm of her high colour and high spirits.
She was a fearless and familiar little thing, who asked disconcerting
questions, made precocious comments, and possessed outlandish arts,
such as dancing a Spanish shawl dance and singing Neapolitan love-songs
to a guitar.  Under the direction of her aunt (whose real name was Mrs.
Thorley Chivers, but who, having received a Papal title, had resumed
her first husband's patronymic, and called herself the Marchioness
Manson, because in Italy she could turn it into Manzoni) the little
girl received an expensive but incoherent education, which included
"drawing from the model," a thing never dreamed of before, and playing
the piano in quintets with professional musicians.

Of course no good could come of this; and when, a few years later, poor
Chivers finally died in a madhouse, his widow (draped in strange weeds)
again pulled up stakes and departed with Ellen, who had grown into a
tall bony girl with conspicuous eyes.  For some time no more was heard
of them; then news came of Ellen's marriage to an immensely rich Polish
nobleman of legendary fame, whom she had met at a ball at the
Tuileries, and who was said to have princely establishments in Paris,
Nice and Florence, a yacht at Cowes, and many square miles of shooting
in Transylvania.  She disappeared in a kind of sulphurous apotheosis,
and when a few years later Medora again came back to New York, subdued,
impoverished, mourning a third husband, and in quest of a still smaller
house, people wondered that her rich niece had not been able to do
something for her.  Then came the news that Ellen's own marriage had
ended in disaster, and that she was herself returning home to seek rest
and oblivion among her kinsfolk.

These things passed through Newland Archer's mind a week later as he
watched the Countess Olenska enter the van der Luyden drawing-room on
the evening of the momentous dinner.  The occasion was a solemn one,
and he wondered a little nervously how she would carry it off.  She
came rather late, one hand still ungloved, and fastening a bracelet
about her wrist; yet she entered without any appearance of haste or
embarrassment the drawing-room in which New York's most chosen company
was somewhat awfully assembled.

In the middle of the room she paused, looking about her with a grave
mouth and smiling eyes; and in that instant Newland Archer rejected the
general verdict on her looks.  It was true that her early radiance was
gone.  The red cheeks had paled; she was thin, worn, a little
older-looking than her age, which must have been nearly thirty.  But
there was about her the mysterious authority of beauty, a sureness in
the carriage of the head, the movement of the eyes, which, without
being in the least theatrical, struck his as highly trained and full of
a conscious power.  At the same time she was simpler in manner than
most of the ladies present, and many people (as he heard afterward from
Janey) were disappointed that her appearance was not more
"stylish"--for stylishness was what New York most valued.  It was,
perhaps, Archer reflected, because her early vivacity had disappeared;
because she was so quiet--quiet in her movements, her voice, and the
tones of her low-pitched voice.  New York had expected something a good
deal more reasonant in a young woman with such a history.

The dinner was a somewhat formidable business.  Dining with the van der
Luydens was at best no light matter, and dining there with a Duke who
was their cousin was almost a religious solemnity.  It pleased Archer
to think that only an old New Yorker could perceive the shade of
difference (to New York) between being merely a Duke and being the van
der Luydens' Duke.  New York took stray noblemen calmly, and even
(except in the Struthers set) with a certain distrustful hauteur; but
when they presented such credentials as these they were received with
an old-fashioned cordiality that they would have been greatly mistaken
in ascribing solely to their standing in Debrett.  It was for just such
distinctions that the young man cherished his old New York even while
he smiled at it.

The van der Luydens had done their best to emphasise the importance of
the occasion.  The du Lac Sevres and the Trevenna George II plate were
out; so was the van der Luyden "Lowestoft" (East India Company) and the
Dagonet Crown Derby.  Mrs. van der Luyden looked more than ever like a
Cabanel, and Mrs. Archer, in her grandmother's seed-pearls and
emeralds, reminded her son of an Isabey miniature.  All the ladies had
on their handsomest jewels, but it was characteristic of the house and
the occasion that these were mostly in rather heavy old-fashioned
settings; and old Miss Lanning, who had been persuaded to come,
actually wore her mother's cameos and a Spanish blonde shawl.

The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as
Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond
necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously
immature compared with hers.  It frightened him to think what must have
gone to the making of her eyes.

The Duke of St. Austrey, who sat at his hostess's right, was naturally
the chief figure of the evening.  But if the Countess Olenska was less
conspicuous than had been hoped, the Duke was almost invisible.  Being
a well-bred man he had not (like another recent ducal visitor) come to
the dinner in a shooting-jacket; but his evening clothes were so shabby
and baggy, and he wore them with such an air of their being homespun,
that (with his stooping way of sitting, and the vast beard spreading
over his shirt-front) he hardly gave the appearance of being in dinner
attire.  He was short, round-shouldered, sunburnt, with a thick nose,
small eyes and a sociable smile; but he seldom spoke, and when he did
it was in such low tones that, despite the frequent silences of
expectation about the table, his remarks were lost to all but his
neighbours.

When the men joined the ladies after dinner the Duke went straight up
to the Countess Olenska, and they sat down in a corner and plunged into
animated talk.  Neither seemed aware that the Duke should first have
paid his respects to Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Headly Chivers, and
the Countess have conversed with that amiable hypochondriac, Mr. Urban
Dagonet of Washington Square, who, in order to have the pleasure of
meeting her, had broken through his fixed rule of not dining out
between January and April.  The two chatted together for nearly twenty
minutes; then the Countess rose and, walking alone across the wide
drawing-room, sat down at Newland Archer's side.

It was not the custom in New York drawing-rooms for a lady to get up
and walk away from one gentleman in order to seek the company of
another.  Etiquette required that she should wait, immovable as an
idol, while the men who wished to converse with her succeeded each
other at her side.  But the Countess was apparently unaware of having
broken any rule; she sat at perfect ease in a corner of the sofa beside
Archer, and looked at him with the kindest eyes.

"I want you to talk to me about May," she said.

Instead of answering her he asked:  "You knew the Duke before?"

"Oh, yes--we used to see him every winter at Nice.  He's very fond of
gambling--he used to come to the house a great deal."  She said it in
the simplest manner, as if she had said:  "He's fond of wild-flowers";
and after a moment she added candidly:  "I think he's the dullest man I
ever met."

This pleased her companion so much that he forgot the slight shock her
previous remark had caused him.  It was undeniably exciting to meet a
lady who found the van der Luydens' Duke dull, and dared to utter the
opinion.  He longed to question her, to hear more about the life of
which her careless words had given him so illuminating a glimpse; but
he feared to touch on distressing memories, and before he could think
of anything to say she had strayed back to her original subject.

"May is a darling; I've seen no young girl in New York so handsome and
so intelligent.  Are you very much in love with her?"

Newland Archer reddened and laughed.  "As much as a man can be."

She continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not to miss any shade
of meaning in what he said, "Do you think, then, there is a limit?"

"To being in love?  If there is, I haven't found it!"

She glowed with sympathy.  "Ah--it's really and truly a romance?"

"The most romantic of romances!"

"How delightful!  And you found it all out for yourselves--it was not
in the least arranged for you?"

Archer looked at her incredulously.  "Have you forgotten," he asked
with a smile, "that in our country we don't allow our marriages to be
arranged for us?"

A dusky blush rose to her cheek, and he instantly regretted his words.

"Yes," she answered, "I'd forgotten.  You must forgive me if I
sometimes make these mistakes.  I don't always remember that everything
here is good that was--that was bad where I've come from."  She looked
down at her Viennese fan of eagle feathers, and he saw that her lips
trembled.

"I'm so sorry," he said impulsively; "but you ARE among friends here,
you know."

"Yes--I know.  Wherever I go I have that feeling.  That's why I came
home.  I want to forget everything else, to become a complete American
again, like the Mingotts and Wellands, and you and your delightful
mother, and all the other good people here tonight.  Ah, here's May
arriving, and you will want to hurry away to her," she added, but
without moving; and her eyes turned back from the door to rest on the
young man's face.

The drawing-rooms were beginning to fill up with after-dinner guests,
and following Madame Olenska's glance Archer saw May Welland entering
with her mother.  In her dress of white and silver, with a wreath of
silver blossoms in her hair, the tall girl looked like a Diana just
alight from the chase.

"Oh," said Archer, "I have so many rivals; you see she's already
surrounded.  There's the Duke being introduced."

"Then stay with me a little longer," Madame Olenska said in a low tone,
just touching his knee with her plumed fan.  It was the lightest touch,
but it thrilled him like a caress.

"Yes, let me stay," he answered in the same tone, hardly knowing what
he said; but just then Mr. van der Luyden came up, followed by old Mr.
Urban Dagonet.  The Countess greeted them with her grave smile, and
Archer, feeling his host's admonitory glance on him, rose and
surrendered his seat.

Madame Olenska held out her hand as if to bid him goodbye.

"Tomorrow, then, after five--I shall expect you," she said; and then
turned back to make room for Mr. Dagonet.

"Tomorrow--" Archer heard himself repeating, though there had been no
engagement, and during their talk she had given him no hint that she
wished to see him again.

As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall and resplendent,
leading his wife up to be introduced; and heard Gertrude Lefferts say,
as she beamed on the Countess with her large unperceiving smile:  "But
I think we used to go to dancing-school together when we were
children--."  Behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the
Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had
declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott's.  As Mrs. Archer
remarked: when the van der Luydens chose, they knew how to give a
lesson.  The wonder was that they chose so seldom.

The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs. van der Luyden
looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the
family diamonds.  "It was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself
so unselfishly to Madame Olenska.  I told your cousin Henry he must
really come to the rescue."

He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if
condescending to his natural shyness:  "I've never seen May looking
lovelier.  The Duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room."

This chapter gives some background on Ellen1s past. Ellen1s parents had been avid travelers and they died early in Ellen1s life. She lived with her aunt Medora Manson who was sort of eccentric. She would dress Ellen in crimson merino and amber beads and did not allow her to mourn for her parents as long as was "proper". She was the only young woman present at the reception for the Duke. After dinner, to many people1s surprise, the Duke headed straight to Ellen where they talked for a while. Then, she left his side, and sat next to Newland. Ellen asks if Newland1s engagement to May was arranged or just sheerly romantic. Newland balks no marriages are arranged in America, he says. Upon getting up, she tells Newland that she expects him to visit her tomorrow after five PM. Then, there is a line of people ready to speak to Ellen; these are the same people that had rejected the invitation to meet her earlier.

This chapter is full of ironies. First, Newland becomes enraptured with Ellen because she defies propriety  yet, this is the one thing that is supposed to make her unacceptable. For example, she explains that the Duke is very dull and Newland thinks it is "undeniably exciting" that she would know him well enough to make the claim and be uninhibited enough to express it. Also ironic is that Newland would claim that his relationship with May is just romantic when it is clear that they are together simply because they are the "perfect match" in terms of the family backgrounds and not because they had fallen in love on their own. It is also ironic that although May is incredibly beautiful, it is the touch of Ellen1s fan that excites him like a caress. Also, it is the Duke who finds May the "most handsome woman in the room"; yet, he is incredibly dull. It makes us wonder if May is handsome only to "dull" people. Is Newland beginning to break from convention and take less interest in her. This chapter is also brilliant in that Wharton clearly articulates some of the stranger codes of this society. Women should not, for example, leave a man1s side and walk across a room unescorted to join the company of another man. Why are these codes important to this society. Are they stifling or liberating. Also, the contrast between May and Ellen is striking and important in this chapter. Ellen is described as aging; with "paled red cheeks. May, on the other hand, looks like an immortal goddess, dressed in white like "Diana alighting from the chase. When Ellen is described, she is always described by her humanness she ages, looks plain and experienced. May is described as superhuman and impossibly innocent in her brilliant white. This contrast runs through the novel

The general opinion is that Ellen is not as pretty as she used to be. We get a brief overview of Ellen Olenska's life. She lost her parents when she was a young child, then became a ward of her aunt, Medora Manson. They spend most of their time traveling, coming back to New York for shorter stays. Then she married the fabulously wealthy Count Olenska. Everybody thought she was all set, but then it turns out that their marriage failed, so here she is, back in New York again. Ellen Olenska arrives late to the van der Luydens's dinner, which is held a week after she received the invite. After the dinner, the Duke of St. Austrey chats with her. It turns out they knew each other in Europe when she was still married to the Count. Then Ellen goes over to Newland to chat, and she asks him about his engagement to May. Mr. van der Luyden interrupts their conversation in order to introduce some more people to Ellen. As Newland gets up to leave, Ellen invites him to see her the next day. Mrs. van der Luyden thanks Newland for paying attention to Ellen, then tells him that the Duke found May the loveliest girl in the room.


The Countess Olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour
Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant
wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired,
far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora.

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in.  Small
dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest
neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a
dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer
and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and
then, had mentioned that he lived.  Winsett did not invite people to
his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a
nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little
shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Madame Olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance
only by a little more paint about the window-frames; and as Archer
mustered its modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must
have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day.  He had lunched with the
Wellands, hoping afterward to carry off May for a walk in the Park.  He
wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had
looked the night before, and how proud he was of her, and to press her
to hasten their marriage.  But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him
that the round of family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted
at advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful eye-brows
and sighed out:  "Twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--"

Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to
another, and Archer, when the afternoon's round was over, parted from
his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild
animal cunningly trapped.  He supposed that his readings in
anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after
all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling; but when he
remembered that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take place
till the following autumn, and pictured what his life would be till
then, a dampness fell upon his spirit.

"Tomorrow," Mrs. Welland called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and
the Dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two
families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter
of the alphabet.

He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska's request--her
command, rather--that he should call on her that afternoon; but in the
brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to
say.  Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the
matter.  He knew that May most particularly wanted him to be kind to
her cousin; was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of
their engagement?  It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but
for the Countess's arrival, he might have been, if not still a free
man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged.  But May had willed it
so, and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and
therefore at liberty, if he chose, to call on her cousin without
telling her.

As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost
feeling.  He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him; he
concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent
bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian.
She welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries
by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into
a low firelit drawing-room.  The room was empty, and she left him, for
an appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to find her
mistress, or whether she had not understood what he was there for, and
thought it might be to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the
only visible specimen had stopped.  He knew that the southern races
communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was
mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible.  At length
she returned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a
phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer: "La signora e
fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean:  "She's out--but you'll
soon see."

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded
shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known.  He knew that the
Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of
wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed, were represented by
some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze
on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the
discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in
old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art.  His
boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest
books: John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of
P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called "The Renaissance" by
Walter Pater.  He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra
Angelico with a faint condescension.  But these pictures bewildered
him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and
therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy; and perhaps, also,
his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding
himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected
him.  He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess
Olenska's request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his
betrothed might come in to see her cousin.  What would she think if she
found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting
alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and
stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him;
but Archer felt more curious than mortified.  The atmosphere of the
room was so different from any he had ever breathed that
self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.  He had been
before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures "of the
Italian school"; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's
shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and
Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a
few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign,"
subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.  He tried to
analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and
tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of
which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the
slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was
not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some
far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and
dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what May's drawing-room would
look like.  He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very
handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East
Thirty-ninth Street.  The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the
house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger
architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone
of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce;
but the plumbing was perfect.  Archer would have liked to travel, to
put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an
extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were
firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple.  The young man
felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up
every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow
doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a
wainscoting of varnished yellow wood.  But beyond that his imagination
could not travel.  He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but
he could not fancy how May would deal with it.  She submitted
cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland
drawing-room, to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern
Saxe.  He saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything
different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that
she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased--which
would be, of course, with "sincere" Eastlake furniture, and the plain
new bookcases without glass doors.

The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log,
and said consolingly: "Verra--verra."  When she had gone Archer stood
up and began to wander about.  Should he wait any longer?  His position
was becoming rather foolish.  Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame
Olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all.

Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's
hoofs; they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a
carriage door.  Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk.
A street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort's
compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan, and the banker
descending from it, and helping out Madame Olenska.

Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion
seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his
carriage while she mounted the steps.

When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer
there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.

"How do you like my funny house?" she asked.  "To me it's like heaven."

As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away
with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.

"You've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness
of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming
desire to be simple and striking.

"Oh, it's a poor little place.  My relations despise it.  But at any
rate it's less gloomy than the van der Luydens'."

The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious
spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der
Luydens gloomy.  Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke
of it as "handsome."  But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice
to the general shiver.

"It's delicious--what you've done here," he repeated.

"I like the little house," she admitted; "but I suppose what I like is
the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town;
and then, of being alone in it."  She spoke so low that he hardly heard
the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.

"You like so much to be alone?"

"Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely."  She sat down
near the fire, said:  "Nastasia will bring the tea presently," and
signed to him to return to his armchair, adding:  "I see you've already
chosen your corner."

Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the
fire under drooping lids.

"This is the hour I like best--don't you?"

A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: "I was afraid you'd
forgotten the hour.  Beaufort must have been very engrossing."

She looked amused.  "Why--have you waited long?  Mr. Beaufort took me
to see a number of houses--since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay
in this one."  She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from
her mind, and went on:  "I've never been in a city where there seems to
be such a feeling against living in des quartiers excentriques.  What
does it matter where one lives?  I'm told this street is respectable."

"It's not fashionable."

"Fashionable!  Do you all think so much of that?  Why not make one's
own fashions?  But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate,
I want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe."

He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her
need of guidance.

"That's what your friends want you to feel.  New York's an awfully safe
place," he added with a flash of sarcasm.

"Yes, isn't it?  One feels that," she cried, missing the mockery.
"Being here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a
good little girl and done all one's lessons."

The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him.  He did
not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one
else take the same tone.  He wondered if she did not begin to see what
a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her.  The
Lovell Mingotts' dinner, patched up in extremis out of all sorts of
social odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her
escape; but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted
disaster, or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van
der Luyden evening.  Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied
that her New York was still completely undifferentiated, and the
conjecture nettled him.

"Last night," he said, "New York laid itself out for you.  The van der
Luydens do nothing by halves."

"No: how kind they are!  It was such a nice party.  Every one seems to
have such an esteem for them."

The terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a
tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings'.

"The van der Luydens," said Archer, feeling himself pompous as he
spoke, "are the most powerful influence in New York society.
Unfortunately--owing to her health--they receive very seldom."

She unclasped her hands from behind her head, and looked at him
meditatively.

"Isn't that perhaps the reason?"

"The reason--?"

"For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare."

He coloured a little, stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration
of the remark.  At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and
they collapsed.  He laughed, and sacrificed them.

Nastasia brought the tea, with handleless Japanese cups and little
covered dishes, placing the tray on a low table.

"But you'll explain these things to me--you'll tell me all I ought to
know," Madame Olenska continued, leaning forward to hand him his cup.

"It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at
so long that I'd ceased to see them."

She detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets,
held it out to him, and took a cigarette herself.  On the chimney were
long spills for lighting them.

"Ah, then we can both help each other.  But I want help so much more.
You must tell me just what to do."

It was on the tip of his tongue to reply:  "Don't be seen driving about
the streets with Beaufort--" but he was being too deeply drawn into the
atmosphere of the room, which was her atmosphere, and to give advice of
that sort would have been like telling some one who was bargaining for
attar-of-roses in Samarkand that one should always be provided with
arctics for a New York winter.  New York seemed much farther off than
Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering
what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look
at his native city objectively.  Viewed thus, as through the wrong end
of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then
from Samarkand it would.

A flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her
thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails.
The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her
braids, and made her pale face paler.

"There are plenty of people to tell you what to do," Archer rejoined,
obscurely envious of them.

"Oh--all my aunts?  And my dear old Granny?"  She considered the idea
impartially.  "They're all a little vexed with me for setting up for
myself--poor Granny especially.  She wanted to keep me with her; but I
had to be free--"  He was impressed by this light way of speaking of
the formidable Catherine, and moved by the thought of what must have
given Madame Olenska this thirst for even the loneliest kind of
freedom.  But the idea of Beaufort gnawed him.

"I think I understand how you feel," he said.  "Still, your family can
advise you; explain differences; show you the way."

She lifted her thin black eyebrows.  "Is New York such a labyrinth?  I
thought it so straight up and down--like Fifth Avenue.  And with all
the cross streets numbered!"  She seemed to guess his faint disapproval
of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face:
"If you knew how I like it for just THAT--the straight-up-and-downness,
and the big honest labels on everything!"

He saw his chance.  "Everything may be labelled--but everybody is not."

"Perhaps.  I may simplify too much--but you'll warn me if I do."  She
turned from the fire to look at him.  "There are only two people here
who make me feel as if they understood what I mean and could explain
things to me: you and Mr. Beaufort."

Archer winced at the joining of the names, and then, with a quick
readjustment, understood, sympathised and pitied.  So close to the
powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely
in their air.  But since she felt that he understood her also, his
business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all
he represented--and abhor it.

He answered gently:  "I understand.  But just at first don't let go of
your old friends' hands: I mean the older women, your Granny Mingott,
Mrs. Welland, Mrs. van der Luyden.  They like and admire you--they want
to help you."

She shook her head and sighed.  "Oh, I know--I know!  But on condition
that they don't hear anything unpleasant.  Aunt Welland put it in those
very words when I tried....  Does no one want to know the truth here,
Mr. Archer?  The real loneliness is living among all these kind people
who only ask one to pretend!" She lifted her hands to her face, and he
saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob.

"Madame Olenska!--Oh, don't, Ellen," he cried, starting up and bending
over her.  He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like
a child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed
herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes.

"Does no one cry here, either?  I suppose there's no need to, in
heaven," she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh, and
bending over the tea-kettle.  It was burnt into his consciousness that
he had called her "Ellen"--called her so twice; and that she had not
noticed it.  Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white
figure of May Welland--in New York.

Suddenly Nastasia put her head in to say something in her rich Italian.

Madame Olenska, again with a hand at her hair, uttered an exclamation
of assent--a flashing "Gia--gia"--and the Duke of St. Austrey entered,
piloting a tremendous blackwigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing
furs.

"My dear Countess, I've brought an old friend of mine to see you--Mrs.
Struthers.  She wasn't asked to the party last night, and she wants to
know you."

The Duke beamed on the group, and Madame Olenska advanced with a murmur
of welcome toward the queer couple.  She seemed to have no idea how
oddly matched they were, nor what a liberty the Duke had taken in
bringing his companion--and to do him justice, as Archer perceived, the
Duke seemed as unaware of it himself.

"Of course I want to know you, my dear," cried Mrs. Struthers in a
round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig.
"I want to know everybody who's young and interesting and charming.
And the Duke tells me you like music--didn't you, Duke?  You're a
pianist yourself, I believe?  Well, do you want to hear Sarasate play
tomorrow evening at my house?  You know I've something going on every
Sunday evening--it's the day when New York doesn't know what to do with
itself, and so I say to it:  'Come and be amused.'  And the Duke
thought you'd be tempted by Sarasate.  You'll find a number of your
friends."

Madame Olenska's face grew brilliant with pleasure.  "How kind!  How
good of the Duke to think of me!" She pushed a chair up to the
tea-table and Mrs. Struthers sank into it delectably.  "Of course I
shall be too happy to come."

"That's all right, my dear.  And bring your young gentleman with you."
Mrs. Struthers extended a hail-fellow hand to Archer.  "I can't put a
name to you--but I'm sure I've met you--I've met everybody, here, or in
Paris or London.  Aren't you in diplomacy?  All the diplomatists come
to me.  You like music too?  Duke, you must be sure to bring him."

The Duke said "Rather" from the depths of his beard, and Archer
withdrew with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of
spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and unnoticing
elders.

He was not sorry for the denouement of his visit: he only wished it had
come sooner, and spared him a certain waste of emotion.  As he went out
into the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent, and May
Welland the loveliest woman in it.  He turned into his florist's to
send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion,
he found he had forgotten that morning.

As he wrote a word on his card and waited for an envelope he glanced
about the embowered shop, and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses.
He had never seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse was
to send them to May instead of the lilies.  But they did not look like
her--there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty.
In a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did,
he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and
slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of
the Countess Olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the
card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box.

"They'll go at once?" he enquired, pointing to the roses.

The florist assured him that they would.

Newland arrives at Ellen1s home in the artist district at five after five. He had had a bad day; he felt like a "wild animal cunningly trapped" because he had been forced to go from home to home announcing his engagement to May. He does not tell May of his meeting with Ellen. When he gets to Ellen1s home she is not there and he relaxes in her living room admiring her exotically decorated home. When she arrives, she explains that she had spent the day with Julius Beaufort looking for a new home because others do not find her home fashionable enough. Ellen is flippant about how she finds New York so safe like a little girl1s paradise. Newland thinks that she should not be so naive about how "powerful an engine" New York is and how she almost was crushed by it. She remarks how she had enjoyed the party at the van der Luydens; Archer says its unfortunate that they do not "receive very often. Ellen, cleverly says, "Perhaps that1s the reason for their great influence. They continue in this manner until the Duke of St. Austrey arrives with Mrs. Struthers. Struthers had not been invited to the Luydens1 party and she had wanted to meet Ellen and invite her to a party at her home. Soon after their arrival, Newland leaves. On his way home, he stops at the florist to send May her daily lilies. He decides to send her the flowers; but he also sends an anonymous bouquet of flaming yellow roses to Ellen.

In this chapter, Newland falls in love with Ellen, as signified by his calling her "Ellen" instead of "Madame Olenska. In a society as proper as New York in the 1890s, calling a woman by her first name indicated that there was a significant emotional tie. He loves her because she defies the rules of society by seemingly not understanding them. She makes light of the powerful figures  Manson Mingott and the van der Luydens. She is close friends with one of the most respectable figures -- the Duke  while simultaneously friends with Beaufort, a man of no reputation. Also, intriguing is the fact that Ellen believes New York society to be plain and straightforward: "I thought it so up and down like Fifth Avenue. And with all the cross streets numbered. Whereas Newland says, "Everything may be labeled but everyone is not. This is ironic, too, because everyone is labeled people judge each other by family name. Another theme in the novel is suggested by Ellen when she says, "The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend. The book is about pretenders; everyone pretends to be something they are not; everyone but Ellen. Newland was frustrated in a prior chapter by the realization that he, too, is being forced to pretend in his relationship with May

After spending the day visiting family with May and Mrs. Welland, Newland arrives at Madame Olenska's a little after 5 p.m. the next day. Madame Olenska lives in a bohemian neighborhood that isn't as stylish as the neighborhoods where everybody else in Archer's circle lives. Madame Olenska isn't in, but her Italian maid asks him to wait in her drawing room. Soon, Newland sees Madame Olenska arrive outside with Julius Beaufort. She and Julius speak, and then Julius leaves in his carriage. Madame Olenska enters the house and greets Newland. They have a conversation about how maze-like New York society can be. Madame Olenska finds all the social rules overwhelming and even cries a little. This makes Newland uncomfy. The Duke of St. Austrey arrives along with Mrs. Struthers. Newland takes his leave. Newland stops by his florist's. He's forgotten to send May the lilies-of-the-valley that he sends her every day. He also sees some yellow roses, which he sends to Madame Olenska, but without a card with his name.


The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after
luncheon.  As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York,
she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons; but
Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her
over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a
hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.

The day was delectable.  The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was
ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like
splintered crystals.  It was the weather to call out May's radiance,
and she burned like a young maple in the frost.  Archer was proud of
the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared
away his underlying perplexities.

"It's so delicious--waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley
in one's room!" she said.

"Yesterday they came late.  I hadn't time in the morning--"

"But your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much
more than if you'd given a standing order, and they came every morning
on the minute, like one's music-teacher--as I know Gertrude Lefferts's
did, for instance, when she and Lawrence were engaged."

"Ah--they would!" laughed Archer, amused at her keenness.  He looked
sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to
add:  "When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather
gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska.  Was that
right?"

"How dear of you!  Anything of that kind delights her.  It's odd she
didn't mention it: she lunched with us today, and spoke of Mr.
Beaufort's having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der
Luyden a whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff.  She seems so
surprised to receive flowers.  Don't people send them in Europe?  She
thinks it such a pretty custom."

"Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by Beaufort's," said Archer
irritably.  Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the
roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them.  He wanted to say:  "I
called on your cousin yesterday," but hesitated.  If Madame Olenska had
not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should.  Yet not
to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked.  To shake
off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and
Mrs. Welland's insistence on a long engagement.

"If you call it long!  Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two
years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a year and a half.  Why aren't we
very well off as we are?"

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of
himself for finding it singularly childish.  No doubt she simply echoed
what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday,
and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.

"Never, if we won't let them, I suppose," he mused, and recalled his
mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: "Women ought to be as free as we
are--"

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young
woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world.  But how many
generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended
bandaged to the family vault?  He shivered a little, remembering some
of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance
of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because
they had no use for them.  What if, when he had bidden May Welland to
open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

"We might be much better off.  We might be altogether together--we
might travel."

Her face lit up.  "That would be lovely," she owned: she would love to
travel.  But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things
so differently.

"As if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer
insisted.

"Newland!  You're so original!" she exulted.

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young
men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making
the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make--even to the
point of calling him original.

"Original!  We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the
same folded paper.  We're like patterns stencilled on a wall.  Can't
you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and
her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.

"Mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed.

"If you would--"

"You DO love me, Newland!  I'm so happy."

"But then--why not be happier?"

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"

"Why not--why not--why not?"

She looked a little bored by his insistence.  She knew very well that
they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason.
"I'm not clever enough to argue with you.  But that kind of thing is
rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have hit on a
word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"

She was evidently staggered by this.  "Of course I should hate it--so
would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and
feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the
discussion, she went on light-heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I
showed Ellen my ring?  She thinks it the most beautiful setting she
ever saw.  There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said.  I
do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!"

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in
his study, Janey wandered in on him.  He had failed to stop at his club
on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the
law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his
class.  He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a
haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour
besieged his brain.

"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head
like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures
lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at
the club at that hour he had gone home instead.  He knew not only what
they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take
in the discussion.  The Duke of course would be their principal theme;
though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a
small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which
Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be
thoroughly gone into.  Such "women" (as they were called) were few in
New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the
appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour
had profoundly agitated society.  Only the day before, her carriage had
passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott's, and the latter had instantly rung the
little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home.
"What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?" people asked each
other with a shudder.  Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that
very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.

He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then
quickly bent over his book (Swinburne's "Chastelard"--just out) as if
he had not seen her.  She glanced at the writing-table heaped with
books, opened a volume of the "Contes Drolatiques," made a wry face
over the archaic French, and sighed:  "What learned things you read!"

"Well--?" he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.

"Mother's very angry."

"Angry?  With whom?  About what?"

"Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here.  She brought word that her
brother would come in after dinner: she couldn't say very much, because
he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself.  He's
with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now."

"For heaven's sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start.  It would take an
omniscient Deity to know what you're talking about."

"It's not a time to be profane, Newland....  Mother feels badly enough
about your not going to church ..."

With a groan he plunged back into his book.

"NEWLAND!  Do listen.  Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers's party last night: she went there with the Duke and Mr.
Beaufort."

At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the
young man's breast.  To smother it he laughed.  "Well, what of it?  I
knew she meant to."

Janey paled and her eyes began to project.  "You knew she meant to--and
you didn't try to stop her?  To warn her?"

"Stop her?  Warn her?"  He laughed again.  "I'm not engaged to be
married to the Countess Olenska!"  The words had a fantastic sound in
his own ears.

"You're marrying into her family."

"Oh, family--family!" he jeered.

"Newland--don't you care about Family?"

"Not a brass farthing."

"Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?"

"Not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."

"Mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips.

He felt like shouting back:  "Yes, she is, and so are the van der
Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed
by the wing-tip of Reality." But he saw her long gentle face puckering
into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.

"Hang Countess Olenska!  Don't be a goose, Janey--I'm not her keeper."

"No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner so
that we might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin
Louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."

"Well--what harm was there in inviting her?  She was the best-looking
woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the
usual van der Luyden banquet."

"You know cousin Henry asked her to please you: he persuaded cousin
Louisa.  And now they're so upset that they're going back to
Skuytercliff tomorrow.  I think, Newland, you'd better come down.  You
don't seem to understand how mother feels."

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother.  She raised a troubled
brow from her needlework to ask: "Has Janey told you?"

"Yes."  He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own.  "But I can't
take it very seriously."

"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?"

"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess
Olenska's going to the house of a woman they consider common."

"Consider--!"

"Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday
evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition."

"Good music?  All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table
and sang the things they sing at the places you go to in Paris.  There
was smoking and champagne."

"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still
goes on."

"I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?"

"I've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday
when we've been in London."

"New York is neither Paris nor London."

"Oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned.

"You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant?  You're
right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our
ways when they come among us.  Ellen Olenska especially: she came back
to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies."

Newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother ventured:  "I was
going to put on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa
for a moment before dinner."  He frowned, and she continued: "I thought
you might explain to her what you've just said: that society abroad is
different ... that people are not as particular, and that Madame
Olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things.  It would
be, you know, dear," she added with an innocent adroitness, "in Madame
Olenska's interest if you did."

"Dearest mother, I really don't see how we're concerned in the matter.
The Duke took Madame Olenska to Mrs. Struthers's--in fact he brought
Mrs. Struthers to call on her.  I was there when they came.  If the van
der Luydens want to quarrel with anybody, the real culprit is under
their own roof."

"Quarrel?  Newland, did you ever know of cousin Henry's quarrelling?
Besides, the Duke's his guest; and a stranger too.  Strangers don't
discriminate: how should they?  Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and
should have respected the feelings of New York."

"Well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw
Madame Olenska to them," cried her son, exasperated.  "I don't see
myself--or you either--offering ourselves up to expiate her crimes."

"Oh, of course you see only the Mingott side," his mother answered, in
the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger.

The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced:
"Mr. Henry van der Luyden."

Mrs. Archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back with an
agitated hand.

"Another lamp," she cried to the retreating servant, while Janey bent
over to straighten her mother's cap.

Mr. van der Luyden's figure loomed on the threshold, and Newland Archer
went forward to greet his cousin.

"We were just talking about you, sir," he said.

Mr. van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement.  He drew off
his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat
shyly, while Janey pushed an arm-chair forward, and Archer continued:
"And the Countess Olenska."

Mrs. Archer paled.

"Ah--a charming woman.  I have just been to see her," said Mr. van der
Luyden, complacency restored to his brow.  He sank into the chair, laid
his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way,
and went on:  "She has a real gift for arranging flowers.  I had sent
her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished.  Instead
of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had
scattered them about loosely, here and there ... I can't say how.  The
Duke had told me: he said:  'Go and see how cleverly she's arranged her
drawing-room.'  And she has.  I should really like to take Louisa to
see her, if the neighbourhood were not so--unpleasant."

A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from Mr. van der
Luyden.  Mrs. Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which
she had nervously tumbled it, and Newland, leaning against the
chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand,
saw Janey's gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.

"The fact is," Mr. van der Luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg
with a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon's great signet-ring,
"the fact is, I dropped in to thank her for the very pretty note she
wrote me about my flowers; and also--but this is between ourselves, of
course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke to carry
her off to parties with him.  I don't know if you've heard--"

Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile.  "Has the Duke been carrying
her off to parties?"

"You know what these English grandees are.  They're all alike.  Louisa
and I are very fond of our cousin--but it's hopeless to expect people
who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about
our little republican distinctions.  The Duke goes where he's amused."
Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke.  "Yes--it seems he took
her with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.  Sillerton Jackson
has just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather
troubled.  So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess
Olenska and explain--by the merest hint, you know--how we feel in New
York about certain things.  I felt I might, without indelicacy, because
the evening she dined with us she rather suggested ... rather let me
see that she would be grateful for guidance.  And she WAS."

Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been
self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions.  On
his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer's countenance
dutifully reflected.

"How kind you both are, dear Henry--always!  Newland will particularly
appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new
relations."

She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said: "Immensely, sir.
But I was sure you'd like Madame Olenska."

Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness.  "I never ask
to my house, my dear Newland," he said, "any one whom I do not like.
And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson."  With a glance at the clock
he rose and added:  "But Louisa will be waiting.  We are dining early,
to take the Duke to the Opera."

After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence
fell upon the Archer family.

"Gracious--how romantic!" at last broke explosively from Janey.  No one
knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had
long since given up trying to interpret them.

Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh.  "Provided it all turns out for
the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will
not.  "Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes
this evening: I really shan't know what to say to him."

"Poor mother!  But he won't come--" her son laughed, stooping to kiss
away her frown.

May and Newland go for a walk in the park. May thanks him for sending her flowers every day and remarks that it is nice that she gets them at different times of the day; it means he thinks each day to send her flowers, unlike Larry Lefferts who had a standing order for Gertrude1s flowers to be sent each day. Newland tells May that he sent Ellen beautiful roses but May remarks that Ellen had not discussed them, although she had discussed flowers from other friends. Newland changes the subject and remarks that their engagement seems very long; May says that everyone else has had similarly long engagements. Newland feels like all of May1s comments have been fed to her by others and wonders how long it will be until she can speak for herself. He worries that when he takes her bandage of innocence off her eyes, she won1t be able to see anything. He suggests that they travel and May remarks that he is terribly original. Then Newland shouts, "Original. We1re all like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. On the suggestion of elopement, May balks, "We can1t behave like people in novels, though, can we. Later, Archer skips his regular trip to the club for fear that his life is becoming to repetitive and predictable. While he is reading novels in his study, Janey tells him that the Countess has gone to a party at Mrs. Struthers. This is horrible, of course, because Struthers is too "common. Newland remarks that he is "not married to Countess Olenska" and has nothing to do with her affairs. Luckily, Henry van der Luyden comes for a visit and does not blame Ellen for her attending the party. She probably just doesn1t understand convention. Henry1s nonchalance about the affair puts Mrs. Archer1s heart at ease: decorum is still intact.

Here we see a deepening of Newland1s infatuation with Ellen. He vocalizes "I1m not engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska" as if he is truly voicing his own desire. He also says, "Ellen was the best looking woman " without even considering May. Also important is the theme of reading in this novel; perhaps Newland is getting his fantastic ideas about what romance and love should be like from his novels. Are the novels to blame for his love of the "exotic" and his infatuation with Ellen. Does May recognize Newland1s new literature-induced impulses. Is this why she says, "We can1t live like people in novels". Also, the fungibility of decorum is displayed in this chapter. Mrs. Archer is totally afraid that Ellen1s behavior is out of place, but when Henry van der Luyden is ready to place the blame for her actions on the Duke, Ellen1s actions are vindicated. We see that morality in this society is quite flexible and dependent upon what those in "power" dictate

The next day, Newland convinces May to ditch church and go for an afternoon stroll through Central Park on the Mall. Those wild and crazy kids. Newland tries to convince May to get married soon, but May says her mother insists on a long engagement. The next afternoon, Newland is smoking in his study before dinner, instead of hanging at the club like he usually does. His sister Janey comes in with the scandalous news that Madame Olenska was seen at Mrs. Struthers's with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort. Scandalous, because Mrs. Struthers is considered "common." Sophy Jackson has arrived to discuss the matter with Mrs. Archer, and Sillerton Jackson is off discussing the matter with Mrs. van der Luyden, before he comes over to the Archers's to do the same thing. Newland thinks Janey and the rest of the family are being ridiculous. He confesses that he knew that Madame Olenska planned on attending Mrs. Struthers's party with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort, and Janey doesn't understand why he didn't stop Madame Olenska. Next, he sees his mother in the drawing room; his mother is equally shocked and thinks that Madame Olenska has offended Mr. van der Luyden by acting in a vulgar way. His mother wants Newland to take her to see Mrs. van der Luyden. Suddenly, the butler announces that Mr. van der Luyden has arrived for a visit. When Mr. van der Luyden enters, he tells them all that he's just been to see Madame Olenska. He's not offended: he thinks she's charming, but he did give her a warning about traipsing around town in unfashionable places like Mrs. Struthers's home.


Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in
his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low,
attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.

Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations
of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident
perplexity.  As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his
hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his
disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family
Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.

"My dear sir--" he always addressed Archer as "sir"--"I have sent for
you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment, I
prefer not to mention either to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."  The
gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for,
as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New
York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since
dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking,
his own grandson.

He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow.  "For family
reasons--" he continued.

Archer looked up.

"The Mingott family," said Mr. Letterblair with an explanatory smile
and bow.  "Mrs. Manson Mingott sent for me yesterday.  Her
grand-daughter the Countess Olenska wishes to sue her husband for
divorce.  Certain papers have been placed in my hands."  He paused and
drummed on his desk.  "In view of your prospective alliance with the
family I should like to consult you--to consider the case with
you--before taking any farther steps."

Archer felt the blood in his temples.  He had seen the Countess Olenska
only once since his visit to her, and then at the Opera, in the Mingott
box.  During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate
image, receding from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful
place in it.  He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's
first random allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded
gossip.  Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful
to him as to his mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no
doubt prompted by old Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently
planning to draw him into the affair.  After all, there were plenty of
Mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a Mingott by
marriage.

He waited for the senior partner to continue.  Mr. Letterblair unlocked
a drawer and drew out a packet.  "If you will run your eye over these
papers--"

Archer frowned.  "I beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the
prospective relationship, I should prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth
or Mr. Redwood."

Mr. Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended.  It was unusual
for a junior to reject such an opening.

He bowed.  "I respect your scruple, sir; but in this case I believe
true delicacy requires you to do as I ask.  Indeed, the suggestion is
not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott's and her son's.  I have seen Lovell
Mingott; and also Mr. Welland.  They all named you."

Archer felt his temper rising.  He had been somewhat languidly drifting
with events for the last fortnight, and letting May's fair looks and
radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the
Mingott claims.  But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott's roused him to a
sense of what the clan thought they had the right to exact from a
prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role.

"Her uncles ought to deal with this," he said.

"They have.  The matter has been gone into by the family.  They are
opposed to the Countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal
opinion."

The young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand.

"Does she want to marry again?"

"I believe it is suggested; but she denies it."

"Then--"

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?
Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my
opinion."

Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents.  Since their
last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in
ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska.  His hour alone with
her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which
the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the
Countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement
in the van der Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch
of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly
gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need
either the private consolations or the public championship of a young
man of his small compass.  To look at the matter in this light
simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim
domestic virtues.  He could not picture May Welland, in whatever
conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and
lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed to
him finer or fairer than in the week that followed.  He had even
yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one
disarming answer to his plea for haste.

"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you
have your way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she
had answered, with her clearest look:  "Yes; and that's what makes it
so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a
little girl."

That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would
like always to be sure of his wife's making.  If one had habitually
breathed the New York air there were times when anything less
crystalline seemed stifling.

The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but
they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's
solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied for
the settlement of her financial situation.  There was also a short
letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer
rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered Mr.
Letterblair's office.

"Here are the letters, sir.  If you wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he
said in a constrained voice.

"Thank you--thank you, Mr. Archer.  Come and dine with me tonight if
you're free, and we'll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish
to call on our client tomorrow."

Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon.  It was a
winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon
above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the
pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr.
Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.  It was impossible to
decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska himself
rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes.  A great wave of
compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood
before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs
from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.

He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be
spared whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the
thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New
York air so pure.  "Are we only Pharisees after all?" he wondered,
puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human
vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty.

For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had
always been.  He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of
risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs.
Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming
air of adventure.  But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman";
foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the
secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he
possessed.  When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but
now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case.  The affair, in short,
had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been
through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed
belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and
respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.  In this view they were
sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female
relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things
happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always
criminal of the woman.  All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew
regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous
and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.
The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to
marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.

In the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess,
love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified.  Rich
and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such
situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally
sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from
sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable
by conventional standards.

On reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at
what hour of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a
messenger-boy, who returned presently with a word to the effect that
she was going to Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with
the van der Luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening
after dinner.  The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet,
without date or address, but her hand was firm and free.  He was amused
at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of Skuytercliff,
but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would
most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the "unpleasant."

He was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext
for excusing himself soon after dinner.  He had formed his own opinion
from the papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go
into the matter with his senior partner.  Mr. Letterblair was a
widower, and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby
room hung with yellowing prints of "The Death of Chatham" and "The
Coronation of Napoleon."  On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton
knife-cases, stood a decanter of Haut Brion, and another of the old
Lanning port (the gift of a client), which the wastrel Tom Lanning had
sold off a year or two before his mysterious and discreditable death in
San Francisco--an incident less publicly humiliating to the family than
the sale of the cellar.

After a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young
broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with
currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.  Mr. Letterblair, who lunched on
a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and deeply, and insisted on his
guest's doing the same.  Finally, when the closing rites had been
accomplished, the cloth was removed, cigars were lit, and Mr.
Letterblair, leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward,
said, spreading his back agreeably to the coal fire behind him:  "The
whole family are against a divorce.  And I think rightly."

Archer instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument.  "But
why, sir?  If there ever was a case--"

"Well--what's the use?  SHE'S here--he's there; the Atlantic's between
them.  She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's
voluntarily returned to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements
take precious good care of that.  As things go over there, Olenski's
acted generously: he might have turned her out without a penny."

The young man knew this and was silent.

"I understand, though," Mr. Letterblair continued, "that she attaches
no importance to the money.  Therefore, as the family say, why not let
well enough alone?"

Archer had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with Mr.
Letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and
supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of
a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.

"I think that's for her to decide."

"H'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?"

"You mean the threat in her husband's letter?  What weight would that
carry?  It's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."

"Yes; but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the
suit."

"Unpleasant--!" said Archer explosively.

Mr. Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the
young man, aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in
his mind, bowed acquiescently while his senior continued:  "Divorce is
always unpleasant."

"You agree with me?" Mr. Letterblair resumed, after a waiting silence.

"Naturally," said Archer.

"Well, then, I may count on you; the Mingotts may count on you; to use
your influence against the idea?"

Archer hesitated.  "I can't pledge myself till I've seen the Countess
Olenska," he said at length.

"Mr. Archer, I don't understand you.  Do you want to marry into a
family with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?"

"I don't think that has anything to do with the case."

Mr. Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young
partner a cautious and apprehensive gaze.

Archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn,
and for some obscure reason he disliked the prospect.  Now that the job
had been thrust on him he did not propose to relinquish it; and, to
guard against the possibility, he saw that he must reassure the
unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the Mingotts.

"You may be sure, sir, that I shan't commit myself till I've reported
to you; what I meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've
heard what Madame Olenska has to say."

Mr. Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of
the best New York tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch,
pleaded an engagement and took leave.

Newland is a junior lawyer and is asked by one of the senior partners, Mr. Letterblair, to advise Ellen Olenska in her divorce. Archer reads the papers and decides that Ellen should not divorce; but when he listens to Mr. Letterblair argue that she should not divorce, he realizes how self-righteous he sounds and believes the best thing would be to talk to Ellen first before he unilaterally condemns her decision.

Newland disregards propriety to allow for Ellen1s freedom, or so he believes. There is a lot in this chapter that deals with facades and hidden intentions. The first question that we must ask is, why is Newland chosen to convince Ellen not to divorce. On first glance, it seems that he is chosen because family members think it is in his best interest to curtail any bad gossip in his fiance1s family. Hence, he should want to keep her from divorcing, out of a selfish desire to make his new marriage successful. However, there is another possible answer  perhaps, members of May1s family have noticed that Newland seems interested in Ellen and they want to force him to understand the mandates of propriety. So, they place him in the position where either he does the "right" thing, makes Ellen choose not to divorce or does the "wrong" thing, encourages Ellen to divorce so she can be free to remarry anyone. Perhaps society is using this predicament as a litmus test of Newland1s character

Two weeks later, Newland is at work at the law firm of Letterblair, Lamson, and Low. Mr. Letterblair calls Newland into his office and announces that the Mingotts want Newland to advise on Madame Olenska's divorce. Newland really doesn't want to be involved because of his connection to May, but Mr. Letterblair insists. The family doesn't want Madame Olenska to divorce but Madame Olenska wants a legal opinion. Mr. Letterblair hands Newland some papers to consider. Newland reviews the papers, which contain some correspondence between Madame Olenska's lawyers and the Count's, as well as a letter from the Count to Madame Olenska. He heads home and sends a note to Madame Olenska, asking if he can meet with her. She agrees to a meeting later that evening since she is leaving for the weekend for the van der Luydens's country home. He then heads to dinner with Mr. Letterblair. Mr. Letterblair is surprised Newland is taking Madame Olenska's request for a divorce seriously, despite the potential for scandal. Newland tells him that he would like to speak with Madame Olenska first before he gives an opinion.