In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits
were exchanged.  The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such
matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his
mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs.
Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that
venerable ancestress's blessing.

A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the
young man.  The house in itself was already an historic document,
though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses
in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue.  Those were of the purest
1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood
consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and
immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who
had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of
her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous
upholstery of the Second Empire.  It was her habit to sit in a window
of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life
and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors.  She seemed in no
hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her
confidence.  She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries,
the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and
the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the
advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was an
impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over which
the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth
asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris.  Meanwhile, as
every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her rooms as
easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu
of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle
life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump
active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something
as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.  She had accepted this
submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in
extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost
unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which
the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation.  A
flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a
still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a
miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave
after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious
armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of
the billows.

The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it
impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic
independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established
herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the
ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room
window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a
looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a bedroom
with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with
frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.

Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this
arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural
incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed
of.  That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies,
in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent
propinquities that their novels described.  It amused Newland Archer
(who had secretly situated the love-scenes of "Monsieur de Camors" in
Mrs. Mingott's bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the
stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable
admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid
woman would have had him too.

To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her
grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple.
Mrs. Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring
sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate
thing for a compromised woman to do.  But at any rate it spared them
the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her
unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future.  The visit
went off successfully, as was to have been expected.  Old Mrs. Mingott
was delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by
watchful relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council;
and the engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws,
met with her unqualified admiration.

"It's the new setting: of course it shows the stone beautifully, but it
looks a little bare to old-fashioned eyes," Mrs. Welland had explained,
with a conciliatory side-glance at her future son-in-law.

"Old-fashioned eyes?  I hope you don't mean mine, my dear?  I like all
the novelties," said the ancestress, lifting the stone to her small
bright orbs, which no glasses had ever disfigured.  "Very handsome,"
she added, returning the jewel; "very liberal.  In my time a cameo set
in pearls was thought sufficient.  But it's the hand that sets off the
ring, isn't it, my dear Mr. Archer?" and she waved one of her tiny
hands, with small pointed nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the
wrist like ivory bracelets.  "Mine was modelled in Rome by the great
Ferrigiani.  You should have May's done: no doubt he'll have it done,
my child.  Her hand is large--it's these modern sports that spread the
joints--but the skin is white.--And when's the wedding to be?" she
broke off, fixing her eyes on Archer's face.

"Oh--" Mrs. Welland murmured, while the young man, smiling at his
betrothed, replied:  "As soon as ever it can, if only you'll back me
up, Mrs. Mingott."

"We must give them time to get to know each other a little better,
mamma," Mrs. Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of
reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined:  "Know each other?
Fiddlesticks!  Everybody in New York has always known everybody.  Let
the young man have his way, my dear; don't wait till the bubble's off
the wine.  Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter
now, and I want to give the wedding-breakfast."

These successive statements were received with the proper expressions
of amusement, incredulity and gratitude; and the visit was breaking up
in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess
Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected
figure of Julius Beaufort.

There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the ladies, and Mrs.
Mingott held out Ferrigiani's model to the banker.  "Ha!  Beaufort,
this is a rare favour!" (She had an odd foreign way of addressing men
by their surnames.)

"Thanks.  I wish it might happen oftener," said the visitor in his easy
arrogant way.  "I'm generally so tied down; but I met the Countess
Ellen in Madison Square, and she was good enough to let me walk home
with her."

"Ah--I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen's here!" cried Mrs.
Mingott with a glorious effrontery.  "Sit down--sit down, Beaufort:
push up the yellow armchair; now I've got you I want a good gossip.  I
hear your ball was magnificent; and I understand you invited Mrs.
Lemuel Struthers?  Well--I've a curiosity to see the woman myself."

She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall
under Ellen Olenska's guidance.  Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed
a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship
in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the
conventions.  Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the
Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the
widow of Struthers's Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year
from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight
little citadel of New York.  "Of course if you and Regina invite her
the thing is settled.  Well, we need new blood and new money--and I
hear she's still very good-looking," the carnivorous old lady declared.

In the hall, while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw
that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning
smile.

"Of course you know already--about May and me," he said, answering her
look with a shy laugh.  "She scolded me for not giving you the news
last night at the Opera: I had her orders to tell you that we were
engaged--but I couldn't, in that crowd."

The smile passed from Countess Olenska's eyes to her lips: she looked
younger, more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood.  "Of
course I know; yes.  And I'm so glad.  But one doesn't tell such things
first in a crowd."  The ladies were on the threshold and she held out
her hand.

"Good-bye; come and see me some day," she said, still looking at Archer.

In the carriage, on the way down Fifth Avenue, they talked pointedly of
Mrs. Mingott, of her age, her spirit, and all her wonderful attributes.
No one alluded to Ellen Olenska; but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was
thinking:  "It's a mistake for Ellen to be seen, the very day after her
arrival, parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour with Julius
Beaufort--" and the young man himself mentally added:  "And she ought
to know that a man who's just engaged doesn't spend his time calling on
married women.  But I daresay in the set she's lived in they do--they
never do anything else." And, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on
which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker,
and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.

The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the
Archers.

Mrs. Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to
be well-informed as to its doings.  Her old friend Mr. Sillerton
Jackson applied to the investigation of his friends' affairs the
patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his
sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by
all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother,
brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in
his picture.

Therefore, whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted to know
about, she asked Mr. Jackson to dine; and as she honoured few people
with her invitations, and as she and her daughter Janey were an
excellent audience, Mr. Jackson usually came himself instead of sending
his sister.  If he could have dictated all the conditions, he would
have chosen the evenings when Newland was out; not because the young
man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but
because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Newland's part, a
tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never
showed.

Mr. Jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth, would also
have asked that Mrs. Archer's food should be a little better.  But then
New York, as far back as the mind of man could travel, had been divided
into the two great fundamental groups of the Mingotts and Mansons and
all their clan, who cared about eating and clothes and money, and the
Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe, who were devoted to travel,
horticulture and the best fiction, and looked down on the grosser forms
of pleasure.

You couldn't have everything, after all.  If you dined with the Lovell
Mingotts you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines; at Adeline
Archer's you could talk about Alpine scenery and "The Marble Faun"; and
luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.  Therefore when a
friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer, Mr. Jackson, who was a true
eclectic, would usually say to his sister:  "I've been a little gouty
since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts'--it will do me good to
diet at Adeline's."

Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow, lived with her son and daughter
in West Twenty-eighth Street.  An upper floor was dedicated to Newland,
and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below.  In
an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests they cultivated ferns in
Wardian cases, made macrame lace and wool embroidery on linen,
collected American revolutionary glazed ware, subscribed to "Good
Words," and read Ouida's novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere.
(They preferred those about peasant life, because of the descriptions
of scenery and the pleasanter sentiments, though in general they liked
novels about people in society, whose motives and habits were more
comprehensible, spoke severely of Dickens, who "had never drawn a
gentleman," and considered Thackeray less at home in the great world
than Bulwer--who, however, was beginning to be thought old-fashioned.)
Mrs. and Miss Archer were both great lovers of scenery.  It was what
they principally sought and admired on their occasional travels abroad;
considering architecture and painting as subjects for men, and chiefly
for learned persons who read Ruskin.  Mrs. Archer had been born a
Newland, and mother and daughter, who were as like as sisters, were
both, as people said, "true Newlands"; tall, pale, and slightly
round-shouldered, with long noses, sweet smiles and a kind of drooping
distinction like that in certain faded Reynolds portraits.  Their
physical resemblance would have been complete if an elderly embonpoint
had not stretched Mrs. Archer's black brocade, while Miss Archer's
brown and purple poplins hung, as the years went on, more and more
slackly on her virgin frame.

Mentally, the likeness between them, as Newland was aware, was less
complete than their identical mannerisms often made it appear.  The
long habit of living together in mutually dependent intimacy had given
them the same vocabulary, and the same habit of beginning their phrases
"Mother thinks" or "Janey thinks," according as one or the other wished
to advance an opinion of her own; but in reality, while Mrs. Archer's
serene unimaginativeness rested easily in the accepted and familiar,
Janey was subject to starts and aberrations of fancy welling up from
springs of suppressed romance.

Mother and daughter adored each other and revered their son and
brother; and Archer loved them with a tenderness made compunctious and
uncritical by the sense of their exaggerated admiration, and by his
secret satisfaction in it.  After all, he thought it a good thing for a
man to have his authority respected in his own house, even if his sense
of humour sometimes made him question the force of his mandate.

On this occasion the young man was very sure that Mr. Jackson would
rather have had him dine out; but he had his own reasons for not doing
so.

Of course old Jackson wanted to talk about Ellen Olenska, and of course
Mrs. Archer and Janey wanted to hear what he had to tell.  All three
would be slightly embarrassed by Newland's presence, now that his
prospective relation to the Mingott clan had been made known; and the
young man waited with an amused curiosity to see how they would turn
the difficulty.

They began, obliquely, by talking about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers.

"It's a pity the Beauforts asked her," Mrs. Archer said gently.  "But
then Regina always does what he tells her; and BEAUFORT--"

"Certain nuances escape Beaufort," said Mr. Jackson, cautiously
inspecting the broiled shad, and wondering for the thousandth time why
Mrs. Archer's cook always burnt the roe to a cinder. (Newland, who had
long shared his wonder, could always detect it in the older man's
expression of melancholy disapproval.)

"Oh, necessarily; Beaufort is a vulgar man," said Mrs. Archer.  "My
grandfather Newland always used to say to my mother:  'Whatever you do,
don't let that fellow Beaufort be introduced to the girls.'  But at
least he's had the advantage of associating with gentlemen; in England
too, they say.  It's all very mysterious--" She glanced at Janey and
paused.  She and Janey knew every fold of the Beaufort mystery, but in
public Mrs. Archer continued to assume that the subject was not one for
the unmarried.

"But this Mrs. Struthers," Mrs. Archer continued; "what did you say SHE
was, Sillerton?"

"Out of a mine: or rather out of the saloon at the head of the pit.
Then with Living Wax-Works, touring New England.  After the police
broke THAT up, they say she lived--"  Mr. Jackson in his turn glanced
at Janey, whose eyes began to bulge from under her prominent lids.
There were still hiatuses for her in Mrs. Struthers's past.

"Then," Mr. Jackson continued (and Archer saw he was wondering why no
one had told the butler never to slice cucumbers with a steel knife),
"then Lemuel Struthers came along.  They say his advertiser used the
girl's head for the shoe-polish posters; her hair's intensely black,
you know--the Egyptian style.  Anyhow, he--eventually--married her."
There were volumes of innuendo in the way the "eventually" was spaced,
and each syllable given its due stress.

"Oh, well--at the pass we've come to nowadays, it doesn't matter," said
Mrs. Archer indifferently.  The ladies were not really interested in
Mrs. Struthers just then; the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh
and too absorbing to them.  Indeed, Mrs. Struthers's name had been
introduced by Mrs. Archer only that she might presently be able to say:
"And Newland's new cousin--Countess Olenska?  Was SHE at the ball too?"

There was a faint touch of sarcasm in the reference to her son, and
Archer knew it and had expected it.  Even Mrs. Archer, who was seldom
unduly pleased with human events, had been altogether glad of her son's
engagement. ("Especially after that silly business with Mrs.
Rushworth," as she had remarked to Janey, alluding to what had once
seemed to Newland a tragedy of which his soul would always bear the
scar.)

There was no better match in New York than May Welland, look at the
question from whatever point you chose.  Of course such a marriage was
only what Newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and
incalculable--and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous--that it was
nothing short of a miracle to see one's only son safe past the Siren
Isle and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.

All this Mrs. Archer felt, and her son knew she felt; but he knew also
that she had been perturbed by the premature announcement of his
engagement, or rather by its cause; and it was for that reason--because
on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master--that he had stayed
at home that evening.  "It's not that I don't approve of the Mingotts'
esprit de corps; but why Newland's engagement should be mixed up with
that Olenska woman's comings and goings I don't see," Mrs. Archer
grumbled to Janey, the only witness of her slight lapses from perfect
sweetness.

She had behaved beautifully--and in beautiful behaviour she was
unsurpassed--during the call on Mrs. Welland; but Newland knew (and his
betrothed doubtless guessed) that all through the visit she and Janey
were nervously on the watch for Madame Olenska's possible intrusion;
and when they left the house together she had permitted herself to say
to her son:  "I'm thankful that Augusta Welland received us alone."

These indications of inward disturbance moved Archer the more that he
too felt that the Mingotts had gone a little too far.  But, as it was
against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever
allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts, he simply replied: "Oh,
well, there's always a phase of family parties to be gone through when
one gets engaged, and the sooner it's over the better."  At which his
mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from
her grey velvet bonnet trimmed with frosted grapes.

Her revenge, he felt--her lawful revenge--would be to "draw" Mr.
Jackson that evening on the Countess Olenska; and, having publicly done
his duty as a future member of the Mingott clan, the young man had no
objection to hearing the lady discussed in private--except that the
subject was already beginning to bore him.

Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the
mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and
had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff.  He
looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably
finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.

Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the candlelit
Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the
dark walls.

"Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!"
he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in
a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house
behind him.  "Well--well--well ... I wonder what he would have said to
all these foreign marriages!"

Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and Mr.
Jackson continued with deliberation: "No, she was NOT at the ball."

"Ah--" Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that implied:  "She had that
decency."

"Perhaps the Beauforts don't know her," Janey suggested, with her
artless malice.

Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible
Madeira.  "Mrs. Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does, for she
was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole
of New York."

"Mercy--" moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of
trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.

"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," Janey
speculated.  "At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet,
perfectly plain and flat--like a night-gown."

"Janey!" said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look
audacious.

"It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," Mrs.
Archer continued.

A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin:  "I don't think it was
a question of taste with her.  May said she meant to go, and then
decided that the dress in question wasn't smart enough."

Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference.  "Poor
Ellen," she simply remarked; adding compassionately:  "We must always
bear in mind what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her.
What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at
her coming-out ball?"

"Ah--don't I remember her in it!" said Mr. Jackson; adding:  "Poor
girl!" in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory, had fully
understood at the time what the sight portended.

"It's odd," Janey remarked, "that she should have kept such an ugly
name as Ellen.  I should have changed it to Elaine."  She glanced about
the table to see the effect of this.

Her brother laughed.  "Why Elaine?"

"I don't know; it sounds more--more Polish," said Janey, blushing.

"It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes,"
said Mrs. Archer distantly.

"Why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative.  "Why
shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses?  Why should she slink
about as if it were she who had disgraced herself?  She's 'poor Ellen'
certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage;
but I don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were
the culprit."

"That, I suppose," said Mr. Jackson, speculatively, "is the line the
Mingotts mean to take."

The young man reddened.  "I didn't have to wait for their cue, if
that's what you mean, sir.  Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life:
that doesn't make her an outcast."

"There are rumours," began Mr. Jackson, glancing at Janey.

"Oh, I know: the secretary," the young man took him up.  "Nonsense,
mother; Janey's grown-up.  They say, don't they," he went on, "that the
secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept
her practically a prisoner?  Well, what if he did?  I hope there isn't
a man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case."

Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler:
"Perhaps ... that sauce ... just a little, after all--"; then, having
helped himself, he remarked: "I'm told she's looking for a house.  She
means to live here."

"I hear she means to get a divorce," said Janey boldly.

"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.

The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil
atmosphere of the Archer dining-room.  Mrs. Archer raised her delicate
eye-brows in the particular curve that signified:  "The butler--" and
the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such
intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his
visit to old Mrs. Mingott.

After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs. Archer and Janey
trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing-room, where, while
the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with
an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood work-table with
a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry
band of field-flowers destined to adorn an "occasional" chair in the
drawing-room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.

While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room, Archer settled Mr.
Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed
him a cigar.  Mr. Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit
his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them), and
stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said:  "You say the
secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow?  Well, he was
still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met 'em living at
Lausanne together."

Newland reddened.  "Living together?  Well, why not?  Who had the right
to make her life over if she hadn't?  I'm sick of the hypocrisy that
would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with
harlots."

He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar.  "Women ought to
be free--as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which
he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted
a sardonic whistle.

"Well," he said after a pause, "apparently Count Olenski takes your
view; for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife
back."

That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies
had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted
thoughtfully to his own study.  A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the
fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows
of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the
mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked
singularly home-like and welcoming.

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a
large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in
the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the
other portraits on the table.  With a new sense of awe he looked at the
frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young
creature whose soul's custodian he was to be.  That terrifying product
of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who
knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a
stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was
borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been
taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions
and set them drifting dangerously through his mind.  His own
exclamation:  "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the
root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as
non-existent.  "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the
kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were
therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to
concede it to them.  Such verbal generosities were in fact only a
humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things
together and bound people down to the old pattern.  But here he was
pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that,
on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all
the thunders of Church and State.  Of course the dilemma was purely
hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was
absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE.  But
Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and
May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,
as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a
marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?  What if, for some one
of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should
tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other?  He reviewed
his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that
answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which
he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland.  He perceived
that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the
versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully
trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his
marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a
dull association of material and social interests held together by
ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other.  Lawrence
Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely
realised this enviable ideal.  As became the high-priest of form, he
had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the
most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's
wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence
was so frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly,
and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact
that Julius Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had
what was known in New York as "another establishment."

Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite
such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor
Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not
of standards.  In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic
world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but
only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who
knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's
engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no
less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having
had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that
people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is
dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of
this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable
for her very frankness and assurance.  She was frank, poor darling,
because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing
to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this,
she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the
facts of life."

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love.  He delighted in the
radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,
her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and
ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance.  (She had
advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,
but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was
straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly
proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths
of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy
to waken.  But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned
discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were
only an artificial product.  Untrained human nature was not frank and
innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive
guile.  And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious
purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts
and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to
be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might
exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those
habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day.  But they
were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement
of which Newland Archer felt no trace.  He could not deplore (as
Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a
blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she
was to give to him.  He could not get away from the fact that if he had
been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find
their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his
anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected
with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)
why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of
experience as himself.

Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind;
but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision
were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska.  Here he
was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure thoughts
and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised
all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie.  "Hang
Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to
undress.  He could not really see why her fate should have the least
bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to
measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced
upon him.

A few days later the bolt fell.

The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal
dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and
a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the
words "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the hospitable
American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or
at least as their ambassadors.

The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in
which the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.
Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who
were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts, on
whom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and
his sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were some
of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant
"young married" set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth
(the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and young
Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden).  The company
indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged to the
little inner group of people who, during the long New York season,
disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently
undiminished zest.

Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had
refused the Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr.
Jackson and his sister.  The intended slight was emphasised by the fact
that even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were
among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in
all of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept,"
without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary
courtesy prescribed.

New York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in
its resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers,
butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were
free; and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell
Mingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not to
meet the Countess Olenska.

The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met it
gallantly.  Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who
confided it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed
passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful
period of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his
instances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause with
an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet
bonnet and said:  "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."

The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,
in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.
At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called "plain
people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who
(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had
been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.
People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used to
be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, and
Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions to
last much longer.

Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum
was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands,
Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented.  Most people imagined
them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least
those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the
professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could
lay claim to that eminence.

"Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this
modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy.  If there is
one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the
Newlands or the Chiverses either.  Our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants,
who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because
they did so well.  One of your great-grandfathers signed the
Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and
received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga.  These
are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or
class.  New York has always been a commercial community, and there are
not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin
in the real sense of the word."

Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York,
knew who these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of Washington
Square, who came of an old English county family allied with the Pitts
and Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants of
Count de Grasse, and the van der Luydens, direct descendants of the
first Dutch governor of Manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionary
marriages to several members of the French and British aristocracy.

The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively
Miss Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family
portraits and Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan,
allied to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van der
Luydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind of
super-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressively
emerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother had
been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island
family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,
after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter
of the Earl of St. Austrey.  The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacs
of Maryland, and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas,
had always remained close and cordial.  Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had
more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house of
Trevenna, the Duke of St.  Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall and
at St.  Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently
announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the
Duchess, who feared the Atlantic).

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, their
place in Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson
which had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to
the famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still
"Patroon."  Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom
opened, and when they came to town they received in it only their most
intimate friends.

"I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenly
pausing at the door of the Brown coupe.  "Louisa is fond of you; and of
course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and also
because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as
Society left."

The "precise and inflexible" engagement ritual begins. Newland, May, and her mother go to old Mrs. Mingott's house, where the pleasantries turn to the family blessing, the engagement ring, and the wedding day. During this conversation, Ellen and Julius Beaufort unexpectedly arrive. Ellen extends an impromptu invitation to Newland to come visit her; however, Newland privately thinks she shouldn't ask an engaged man to call on a married woman. The next evening, Mr. Sillerton Jackson dines at the Archer's and spreads gossipy information with his acerbic tongue. He criticizes Ellen for walking up Fifth Avenue during fashionable hours with Julius Beaufort, a married man. Totally out of character, Newland takes up Ellen's defense, saying that her bad marriage was a matter of poor luck. Later, in the study when the men are alone, Jackson reveals that Ellen was allegedly living with her husband's male secretary a year after her "escape," and Newland defends her again. After Jackson leaves, Newland sits alone in his armchair before the fire considering his upcoming marriage and the disturbing influence Ellen's arrival has had on his thinking. How could he defend Ellen's deeds when religious and social standards see them as reprehensible? His worst fears are confirmed when the Lovell Mingotts send out invitations to a formal dinner for Ellen, and New York society rejects the invitation within 48 hours.

Visiting Mrs. Manson Mingott is intriguing. Her huge physical appearance is comedic and if she had not had such a scrupulous past, she would be a character from a wicked French novel. Her position allows her to make critical comments that others cannot make. Implying that Mrs. Lemuel Struther's arrival is like fresh meat, she personifies New York as a carnivorous creature needing new blood. In these chapters, Newland begins a puzzling defense of Ellen. While Mrs. Archer questions what their ancestors would have thought of Ellen's behavior, she knows what current New Yorkers think. It is one thing to be ignorant of New York's social code, but another thing to be told and not comply. Newland appears to totally defend Ellen, and it is puzzling that somehow Newland is forgetting the double standard favoring men. However, alone in his study, we see another side of Newland and his thoughts about women. His society disallows women knowledge about life outside their narrow existence; in fact, his sister Janey is a perfect example. His fiance, May, is also totally naive and Newland feels that husbands and wives must live in a world "where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs." Before Ellen came, he had no problem with this code; why has her arrival had such an unsettling effect on him? Despite his protests to Jackson, "nice" women cannot be as free as men. But why should Lawrence Lefferts' marriage be the gold standard, where a man can have numerous affairs, but his wife must not do the same? Newland defends Ellen's right to be "free," but contemptuously calls the Count's women friends "harlots." Obviously, women who are "free" trouble New Yorkers. Glossary embonpoint plumpness; corpulence. Siren Isle  home of any of several sea nymphs, represented as part bird and part woman, who lure sailors to their death on rocky coasts by seductive singing. heiroglyphic a picture or symbol representing a word, syllable, or sound; hard to interpret or understand. Chippendale designating or of an eighteenth-century English style of furniture characterized by graceful lines and, often, rococo ornamentation. Patroon a person who held a large estate with manorial rights under a grant from the Dutch government of New Netherland.

As is expected of all newly engaged couples, Archer and May begin a series of betrothal visits to their friends and relatives. The first is to Mrs. Manson Mingott, who lives by herself in a grand and unorthodox mansion near Central Park. Because of her tremendous obesity, she is confined to her house; but because of her social influence, she is not isolated from the rest of society. Mrs. Mingott happily receives the couple and instructs May on wedding preparations. As they are about to take their leave, Ellen Olenska returns home from shopping with Julius Beaufort. Archer notices that Mrs. Mingott greets them both cordially; she does not seem to consider it improper, as he does, that a married man should be seen in daylight with a recently-separated woman. As Archer leaves, he speaks briefly to the Countess about his engagement to May. She is very pleased and asks Archer to call on her soon. As Archer leaves, he inwardly remarks that the Countess's behavior with Beaufort is most likely acceptable in Europe. All the same, he is glad he is marrying a member of his own New York clan. The next evening Sillerton Jackson dines with Archer and Archer's mother and sister at their home. Jackson and the two women are eager to gossip about the arrival of the Countess Olenska. When the conversation inevitably drifts to discussing her appearance in public with Beaufort, Archer shocks his family by claiming that she has the right to go where she chooses and that he hopes the Countess will get a divorce from her brutish husband, even if such things are seldom done. He remarks that he is tired of a double standard for the affairs of men and women and that it is time for women to be as free as men. Alone in his study after dinner, Archer contemplates his approaching marriage to May. Regarding her picture, he wonders to what extent she is the product of her society. Recalling his assertion at dinner that women should have the same freedoms as men, he now concludes that the nice women of his class were brought up to never desire freedom. Archer suddenly realizes that although he wants his future wife to be free and to form her own thoughts, she has been carefully trained by her family not to possess such traits. To him, May is innocent because she is ignorant. While he remains unwavering in his decision to marry her, he begins to feel that his marriage will not be entirely what he had previously expected. A few days later, the Mingott family is in great distress. After having sent out invitations for a formal dinner to be held in honor of the Countess Olenska, they have received refusals from practically all of the invites. It is clear that New York has decided to scorn the Countess Olenska by not attending her welcoming dinner. In protest, Archer appeals to his mother to talk with Henry and Louisa van der Luyden. The van der Luydens, a frail old couple who are seldom seen in public and receive only their most intimate friends at home, are regarded as the most powerful and most elite figures in New York society. Archer hopes that their influence can atone for the slight that has been dealt to the Countess and her family.

Chapter 4 opens with one of the most humorous character sketches in the novel. The immensely large Mrs. Manson Mingott is an intriguing character to Archer because of her slightly unorthodox living arrangement and her candid way of speaking. Because of her impeccable moral character and high societal status, her free style of conversation does not scandalize others or disrupt the given social standards. As such, she can easily get away with making some perceptive and occasionally critical insights into the society of Old New York. When Beaufort arrives with Countess Olenska at Mrs. Mingott's home, she asks him if he will be inviting Mrs. Lemuel Struthers and remarks that New York is in need of "new blood and new money." While Old New York is intensely close-knit and hostile to nouveau-riche outsiders, it is also in risk of isolating itself completely from the rest of the world, to the detriment of its own health. The character of Newland Archer also takes on several nuances in these chapters. In the opening Opera scene, Archer appears to be as preoccupied with correct appearances as his friends. At Mrs. Mingott's house, Wharton demonstrates how Archer's thoughts on form depart from the norm. He admires Mrs. Mingott's strong personality and the slight sense of impropriety in the arrangement of her house. Yet Archer is relieved when he discovers that Ellen is out for the day, for he fears the controversy associated with her. His acceptance of unconventionality, then, is limited. Mrs. Mingott's harmless banter is not nearly as destabilizing as Ellen's behavior in walking in public with Beaufort, which threatens the social code to which Archer is accustomed. In chapters five and six, we also get a glimpse into Archer's thoughts on women. At dinner with his family and Sillerton Jackson, Archer attempts to defend Ellen's right to have an affair following the infidelities of her husbands by proclaiming that women should be as free as men when it came to their personal relationships. Yet Archer's attempts at gender equality are belied by many of his other comments. Later that evening, he remarks to Jackson that he is "sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots." While he does here defend Ellen's right to manage her own affairs, he labels other women who have made similar choices as 'harlots.' Archer also shows his unequal treatment of women in regards to his own past. In the novel's elliptical allusions to his former mistress, Archer is always inclined to judge her actions harshly. Archer is also led to wonder about the usefulness of asserting such rights for women. Although he loves and admires May, he sees that she has been brought up to be a nice woman, one who would never request the right to have an affair. With this revelation, Archer begins to realize just how circumscribed the lives of May and other women in New York society really are. They have been brought up never to question inequalities or double standards. In fact, it is as if they are not even aware that such inequalities exist. They exist in a state of perpetual innocence, untroubled by what they do not know. With this revelation, Archer becomes further disillusioned with the strict codes of Old New York.


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."

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."

The van der Luydens are one of three New York families with aristocratic bloodlines. They listen to Mrs. Archer's account of the slight conferred upon the Countess by New York society, and decide that a show of family loyalty would rectify the situation. Because Louisa's relative, the Duke of St. Austrey, is arriving from Russia, the van der Luydens will include the Countess in their dinner and reception for him. At the party, the van der Luydens spare no pains in providing the best china, silver, and glassware. Newland notices that the Countess is pale but very confident with almost a regal bearing. She does not seem decadent, as her past would suggest. However, when Newland and the Countess speak after dinner he is shocked by her sadness and candor. She wants to be all things American and when she touches his knee with her fan he feels unexpected electricity. Breaking an unspoken social rule, the Countess says she will see Newland at five o'clock the next day. Surprised, he agrees. Later he watches couples -- including the Lefferts, who initially turned down the Archers' invitation -- standing in line to be introduced to the Countess now that the van der Luydens have included her in their social circle.

Wharton uses word painting to describe the intolerant, rigid older generation. The van der Luydens symbolize the frosty chill of old New York. Newland believes Louisa has been "gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere" like "bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death." Louisa defers to her husband almost sacredly and Newland has a disturbing vision of his own marriage in future years. The van der Luydens hold family loyalty as sacrosanct. Mrs. Mingott remarks, however, that New York society needs new blood. The van der Luydens are the proof. Wharton personifies New York society as having eyes and ears because the van der Luyden's carriage in front of the Mingott household is instant news. As "arbiters of taste," the van der Luydens contrast considerably with Lawrence Lefferts. Newland says that Lefferts conspired to keep everyone away from the Countess' dinner because he had neglected his wife and he needed to point a hypocritical finger elsewhere to keep her from discovering his latest indiscretion. Mrs. Archer remarks, "It shows what Society has come to." While Lefferts is tolerated despite his known indiscretions, the Countess is ostracized until the family gives an outward appearance of accepting her. Dinner is a wonderful venue for contrasting old, cosmopolitan Europe with upstart, provincial New York and Wharton wastes no time in ironically portraying their attitudes. One would expect the Countess and the Duke, as representatives of European royalty, to be concerned with the stuffy rules of society, but instead, they ignore the rules. The New Yorkers, products of the "new world," might be expected to be free and liberated, but instead, they are the ones commenting on breaches of etiquette. Glossary ormolu imitation gold leaf. Patience the British name for the card game Solitaire. "Esther . . . Ahasuerus" a biblical allusion that compares Mrs. van der Luyden's intercession with her husband to that of Esther, who interceded with Ahasuerus to save her people . Debrett biographical reference books chronicaling the British Peerage and Baronetage; a respected "Who's Who" of British meritocracy. Diana  the virgin goddess of the moon and hunting. Here, a symbol of May Welland's innocence and virgin purity.