Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East
Thirty-ninth Street.

He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration
of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle of
those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the
throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically
catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some one
say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting
alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure
in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of
the old Museum.

The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking
with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the
scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had
happened.  There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to
him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young
women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a
child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to
church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop
of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the
pride and ornament of his diocese.  There Dallas had first staggered
across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse laughed behind
the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother),
had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Reggie
Chivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her through her
wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them
to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled on its
foundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchanged
institution.

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future
of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,
Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for
sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had
finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a
rising New York architect.

The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and
business and taking up all sorts of new things.  If they were not
absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that
they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture
or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the
prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting
Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word
"Colonial."  Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the
millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that
library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one
evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,
banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician!  You're the kind of man the country
wants, Archer.  If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you
have got to lend a hand in the cleaning."

"Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase!  How eagerly he
had risen up at the call!  It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal
to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man
who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was
irresistible.

Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself WERE what
his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore
Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,
for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and
had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and
from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the
reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its
apathy.  It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered
to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked
forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which
their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new
state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built
wall.  He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature
a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to
contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship
to be his strength and pride.

He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good
citizen."  In New York, for many years past, every new movement,
philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinion
and wanted his name.  People said:  "Ask Archer" when there was a
question of starting the first school for crippled children,
reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club, inaugurating
the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music.  His
days were full, and they were filled decently.  He supposed it was all
a man ought to ask.

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.  But he thought of
it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined
would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first
prize in a lottery.  There were a hundred million tickets in HIS
lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too
decidedly against him.  When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was
abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a
book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he
had missed.  That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him
from thinking of other women.  He had been what was called a faithful
husband; and when May had suddenly died--carried off by the infectious
pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he had
honestly mourned her.  Their long years together had shown him that it
did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept
the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of
ugly appetites.  Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and
mourned for it.  After all, there was good in the old ways.

His eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas with
English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white
and pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlake
writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his
first photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.

There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin
and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the
Mission garden.  And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;
never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous,
faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of
growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt
itself without her ever being conscious of the change.  This hard
bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered.
Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their
views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first,
a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in
which father and children had unconsciously collaborated.  And she had
died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious
households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was
convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate
in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his
parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her)
would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill.  And of Mary she was
sure as of her own self.  So, having snatched little Bill from the
grave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to her
place in the Archer vault in St.  Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already lay
safe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had never
even become aware of.

Opposite May's portrait stood one of her daughter.  Mary Chivers was as
tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and
slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required.  Mary Chivers's
mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the
twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned.  And
the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely
girt as her figure.  Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more
intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views.  There
was good in the new order too.

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs,
unhooked the transmitter at his elbow.  How far they were from the days
when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's
only means of quick communication!

"Chicago wants you."

Ah--it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent to
Chicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the Lakeside palace they
were to build for a young millionaire with ideas.  The firm always sent
Dallas on such errands.

"Hallo, Dad--Yes: Dallas.  I say--how do you feel about sailing on
Wednesday?  Mauretania: Yes, next Wednesday as ever is.  Our client
wants me to look at some Italian gardens before we settle anything, and
has asked me to nip over on the next boat.  I've got to be back on the
first of June--" the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh--"so we
must look alive.  I say, Dad, I want your help: do come."

Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by and
natural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by the
fire.  The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for
long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as
electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages.  But the laugh did
startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and
miles of country--forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and
busy indifferent millions--Dallas's laugh should be able to say: "Of
course, whatever happens, I must get back on the first, because Fanny
Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth."

The voice began again:  "Think it over?  No, sir: not a minute.  You've
got to say yes now.  Why not, I'd like to know?  If you can allege a
single reason--No; I knew it.  Then it's a go, eh?  Because I count on
you to ring up the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd better
book a return on a boat from Marseilles.  I say, Dad; it'll be our last
time together, in this kind of way--.  Oh, good!  I knew you would."

Chicago rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace up and down the
room.

It would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy was
right.  They would have lots of other "times" after Dallas's marriage,
his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and Fanny
Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to
interfere with their intimacy.  On the contrary, from what he had seen
of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it.  Still,
change was change, and differences were differences, and much as he
felt himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was tempting
to seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.

There was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound one
that he had lost the habit of travel.  May had disliked to move except
for valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea or in the
mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving the house in
Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at the Wellands' in
Newport.  After Dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her duty
to travel for six months; and the whole family had made the
old-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland and Italy.  Their time
being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted France.  Archer
remembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont Blanc
instead of Rheims and Chartres.  But Mary and Bill wanted
mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in Dallas's wake
through the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her children,
had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic and
artistic proclivities.  She had indeed proposed that her husband should
go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the Italian lakes after
they had "done" Switzerland; but Archer had declined.  "We'll stick
together," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting such a
good example to Dallas.

Since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason for
his continuing in the same routine.  His children had urged him to
travel: Mary Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad
and "see the galleries."  The very mysteriousness of such a cure made
her the more confident of its efficacy.  But Archer had found himself
held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from
new things.

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for
doing anything else.  At least that was the view that the men of his
generation had taken.  The trenchant divisions between right and wrong,
honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little
scope for the unforeseen.  There are moments when a man's imagination,
so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily
level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.  Archer hung there and
wondered....

What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose
standards had bent and bound him?  He remembered a sneering prophecy of
poor Lawrence Lefferts's, uttered years ago in that very room:  "If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort's
bastards."

It was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing;
and nobody wondered or reproved.  Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who still
looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her
mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and
carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and
Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a
"set" from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned
beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an
Isabey miniature.

Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the
death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won
it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid
of her, society took her joyfully for granted.  She was pretty, amusing
and accomplished: what more did any one want?  Nobody was narrow-minded
enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's
past and her own origin.  Only the older people remembered so obscure
an incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or
the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to the
notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a
little girl who inherited her beauty.  He was subsequently heard of in
Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American
travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he
represented a large insurance agency.  He and his wife died there in
the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had
appeared in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack
Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian.  The
fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's
children, and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was
announced.

Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the
world had travelled.  People nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms
and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much
about their neighbours.  And of what account was anybody's past, in the
huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same
plane?

Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety
of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and
eagerness of youth.

It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening
waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot
temples.  He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in
the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not.  "It
functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he
reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had
announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would
approve.

"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that
they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took
it for granted that we shouldn't.  Only, I wonder--the thing one's so
certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"

It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine
held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the
Place Vendome.  One of the things he had stipulated--almost the only
one--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris,
he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."

"Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed.  "I'll take
you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving his
father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and
emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for
its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the
scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and
he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's
life.  Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had
gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the
avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public
gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll
of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and
pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.  Now the spectacle
was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy,
old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....

Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder.  "Hullo, father: this
is something like, isn't it?"  They stood for a while looking out in
silence, and then the young man continued:  "By the way, I've got a
message for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past
five."

He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual
item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave
for Florence the next evening.  Archer looked at him, and thought he
saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's
malice.

"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued.  "Fanny made me swear to do
three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last
Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska.  You
know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from
Buenos Ayres to the Assomption.  Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, and
Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays.
I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's.  And
she's our cousin, of course.  So I rang her up this morning, before I
went out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to
see her."

Archer continued to stare at him.  "You told her I was here?"

"Of course--why not?"  Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically.  Then,
getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a
confidential pressure.

"I say, father: what was she like?"

Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze.  "Come, own
up: you and she were great pals, weren't you?  Wasn't she most awfully
lovely?"

"Lovely?  I don't know.  She was different."

"Ah--there you have it!  That's what it always comes to, doesn't it?
When she comes, SHE'S DIFFERENT--and one doesn't know why.  It's
exactly what I feel about Fanny."

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm.  "About Fanny?  But, my
dear fellow--I should hope so!  Only I don't see--"

"Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric!  Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.  He was the
first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to
inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve.  "What's the use of
making mysteries?  It only makes people want to nose 'em out," he
always objected when enjoined to discretion.  But Archer, meeting his
eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

"My Fanny?"

"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't,"
continued his surprising son.

"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

"No: you date, you see, dear old boy.  But mother said--"

"Your mother?"

"Yes: the day before she died.  It was when she sent for me alone--you
remember?  She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would
be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you
most wanted."

Archer received this strange communication in silence.  His eyes
remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the
window.  At length he said in a low voice:  "She never asked me."

"No.  I forgot.  You never did ask each other anything, did you?  And
you never told each other anything.  You just sat and watched each
other, and guessed at what was going on underneath.  A deaf-and-dumb
asylum, in fact!  Well, I back your generation for knowing more about
each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about
our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me?  If
you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's.  I've got to
rush out to Versailles afterward."

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles.  He preferred to spend
the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris.  He had to deal all
at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.

After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion.  It
seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all,
some one had guessed and pitied....  And that it should have been his
wife moved him indescribably.  Dallas, for all his affectionate
insight, would not have understood that.  To the boy, no doubt, the
episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted
forces.  But was it really no more?  For a long time Archer sat on a
bench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life
rolled by....

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited.  She had
never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years
before, she had made no change in her way of living.  There was nothing
now to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries
gardens to the Louvre.  She had once told him that she often went
there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place
where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been.  For an hour
or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of
afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their
half-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of
beauty.  After all, his life had been too starved....

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying:  "But
I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away.  For such summer
dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of
friendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and
together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the
bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was
talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles.  He had had but one
previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to
pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with
the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure
criticism tripped each other up on his lips.

As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness
increased.  The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the
facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a
master but as an equal.  "That's it: they feel equal to things--they
know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman
of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and
with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm.  "Oh, by
Jove," he exclaimed.

They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the
Invalides.  The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding
trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself
all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol
of the race's glory.

Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the
avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter
as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit
it up.  Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light
became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived.  For
nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely
little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to
be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs.  He thought of the
theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at,
the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people
she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,
images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a
setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young
Frenchman who had once said to him:  "Ah, good conversation--there is
nothing like it, is there?"

Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty
years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame
Olenska's existence.  More than half a lifetime divided them, and she
had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society
he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly
understand.  During that time he had been living with his youthful
memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible
companionship.  Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something
apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim
chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....

They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of
the thoroughfares flanking the building.  It was a quiet quarter, after
all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one
an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this
were left to the few and the indifferent.

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by
a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square
into which they had turned.  Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

"It must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with
a movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood
together looking up at the house.

It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but
many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured
front.  On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the
rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were
still lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

"I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
porte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to
say:  "The fifth.  It must be the one with the awnings."

Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end
of their pilgrimage had been attained.

"I say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.

The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.

"I believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.

"Why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed.

"Oh, perfectly.  But I should like you, please, to go up without me."

Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered.  "But, I say, Dad: do you
mean you won't come up at all?"

"I don't know," said Archer slowly.

"If you don't she won't understand."

"Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."

Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

"But what on earth shall I say?"

"My dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father
rejoined with a smile.

"Very well.  I shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking up
the five flights because you don't like lifts."

His father smiled again.  "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough."

Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture,
passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.

Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged
balcony.  He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up
in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to
the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room.  He pictured Dallas
entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful
smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy
"took after him."

Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at
that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark
lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out
a long thin hand with three rings on it....  He thought she would be
sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her
on a table.

"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard
himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose
its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each
other.

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes
never turning from the balcony.  At length a light shone through the
windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew
up the awnings, and closed the shutters.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got
up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

A Note on the Text

The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large installments in The
Pictorial Review, from July to October 1920.  It was published that
same year in book form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and in
London.  Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation, and spelling
changes and revisions between the serial and book publication, and more
than thirty subsequent changes were made after the second impression of
the book edition had been run off.  This authoritative text is
reprinted from the Library of America edition of Novels by Edith
Wharton, and is based on the sixth impression of the first edition,
which incorporates the last set of extensive revisions that are
obviously authorial.

Newland is now fifty-seven and he is remembering his life while sitting at hiswriting table. He thinks about his son Dallas and his daughter Mary. Mary married one of Reggie Chivers1s dullest sons. Dallas became an architect and Newland became a politician, briefly. Newland realizes that he has become a "good citizen" although he has missed the "flower of life. Newland respected the duty of marriage and mourned when May died. Dallas calls his father on the telephone and tells him that he is going to Paris on business; Newland must accompany him. Newland reflects that so much had changed in his world. Dallas, his eldest son, was in fact marrying on e of :Beaufort1s bastards", Fanny Beaufort, and no one cared. Newland goes to Paris with his son; there, Dallas informs him that Ellen is expecting them in the evening. Dallas says that Newland should definitely go see her because Ellen was once "Newland1s Fanny", the "woman Newland would have chucked everything for, but didn1t. Dallas reveals that May said, on her death bed, that she asked Newland to give up the thing he wanted most, and he did. Newland says simply, "She didn1t ask. Dallas then remarks that May and Newland never told each other anything; they lived in a silent "deaf and dumb asylum. When Newland and Dallas arrive in Ellen1s neighborhood; Newland decided that he doesn1t want to go up and see her. When Dallas asks him what she should say on his behalf, he says, say that I1m "Old-fashioned. Dallas goes to see Ellen and Newland sits on the bench outside her building for a long time; when a servant comes to shut her shutters, Newland decides to leave the neighborhood.

This chapter is written to show, quite ironically, that all the prohibitions that "bent and bound" Newland no longer exist a generation later. His son Dallas is able to live the life that Newland would have lived if he had not had Society choosing the women he mustt marry, the profession he would have, the way he would speak. Dallas makes fun of Newland for living such a life without passion, living in a "deaf and dumb asylum" for so many years. Newland even recognizes that the death of May has liberated him to finally be with his true love, Ellen, but habit has made him a coward and trapped in the same day-to-day life. What is so sad about the ending is that earlier in the novel there was always someone to blame for why Newland and Ellen could not be together. First, Ellen was still married; then the wedding was moved forward; then May was pregnant. But now, at the end, there is nothing stopping Newland from meeting Ellen. But Newland has become so inculcated by his old society values that he can1t even act when there are no prohibitions. Now, the theme of the book becomes tricky. Prior to this chapter, one could make an easy case that Society prevented people from realizing their dreams. But now we see, that it is Newland1s own cowardice that prevents him from being happy. Society becomes just an excuse for why people don1t seek out their dreams. Beaufort is an example of a man from his own generation who found happiness despite the regulations, his own financial destruction and the disdain of society. Wharton1s point seems to be that people should not blame their society for their inability to act the rules and norms of society change rapidly, so it is only one1s personal standards that can be constant and abided by

Twenty-six years have passed. Newland Archer is sitting in his library. He has just returned from the opening of the new galleries in the Metropolitan Museum. The memory of the Cesnola galleries reminded him of his talk with Madame Olenska there. Over those years, he has had three children with May: Dallas, Mary, and Bill. May passed away a couple of years ago nursing the youngest child through pneumonia. Mary is married to one of the Chivers's sons. Dallas is working with an architecture firm in Chicago and engaged to be married to Fanny Beaufort, Mr. Julius Beaufort's daughter. Fanny Beaufort has an interesting history. Few remember Beaufort's disaster, and when his wife died, he had married his mistress, Fanny Ring, and they had a daughter, Fanny Beaufort. When the Beauforts died, May's brother and sister-in-law had been appointed her guardian. Fanny has been completely accepted by New York society. Newland Archer has built up a reputation for himself as a "good citizen." He spent a year in politics, and counts the Governor of New York as one of his friends. Mostly he spends his time with philanthropic causes. He receives a phone call from Dallas, who invites him to go to Europe with him. Newland agrees. The day after their arrival in Paris, Dallas informs his father that they have been invited to visit Countess Olenska at 5:30. Dallas promised Fanny that he would visit her since Countess Olenska was so kind to Fanny when Fanny went to a convent school in Paris. Dallas asks his father frankly whether Countess Olenska was his "Fanny," i.e. lover. He tells his father that the day before his mother died, his mother had told him that they would be safe with his father because when she had asked him to give up the one thing he wanted most, he had done so. Archer replies that May never asked. Dallas doesn't think that's unusual, since he's accustomed to his parents silently agreeing on things. While Dallas spends the day at Versailles, Archer visits the Louvre. He remembers the Countess saying she liked the Louvre. Archer and Dallas meet up again at the hotel, and cross the Place des Invalides on the way over to Countess Olenska's together. When they arrive, Archer informs Dallas that he doesn't want to see Countess Olenska after all, and sits outside as Dallas goes inside. He fantasizes about what is going on in Countess Olenska's rooms as he sits outside on a bench and looks up at her open windows. When a servant comes out to close the shutters, Archer gets up and walks back alone to his hotel.


On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was
singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan
distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should
compete in costliness and splendour with those of the great European
capitals, the world of fashion was still content to reassemble every
winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy.
Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus
keeping out the "new people" whom New York was beginning to dread and
yet be drawn to; and the sentimental clung to it for its historic
associations, and the musical for its excellent acoustics, always so
problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.

It was Madame Nilsson's first appearance that winter, and what the
daily press had already learned to describe as "an exceptionally
brilliant audience" had gathered to hear her, transported through the
slippery, snowy streets in private broughams, in the spacious family
landau, or in the humbler but more convenient "Brown coupe." To come to
the Opera in a Brown coupe was almost as honourable a way of arriving
as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means had the
immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to
democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in
the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of
one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy.  It was
one of the great livery-stableman's most masterly intuitions to have
discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more
quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the
curtain had just gone up on the garden scene.  There was no reason why
the young man should not have come earlier, for he had dined at seven,
alone with his mother and sister, and had lingered afterward over a
cigar in the Gothic library with glazed black-walnut bookcases and
finial-topped chairs which was the only room in the house where Mrs.
Archer allowed smoking.  But, in the first place, New York was a
metropolis, and perfectly aware that in metropolises it was "not the
thing" to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not "the
thing" played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the
inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his
forefathers thousands of years ago.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one.  He had dawdled
over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over
a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its
realisation.  This was especially the case when the pleasure was a
delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were; and on this occasion the
moment he looked forward to was so rare and exquisite in quality
that--well, if he had timed his arrival in accord with the prima
donna's stage-manager he could not have entered the Academy at a more
significant moment than just as she was singing:  "He loves me--he
loves me not--HE LOVES ME!--" and sprinkling the falling daisy petals
with notes as clear as dew.

She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an
unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the
German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be
translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of
English-speaking audiences.  This seemed as natural to Newland Archer
as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the
duty of using two silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue
enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a
flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.

"M'ama ... non m'ama ..." the prima donna sang, and "M'ama!", with a
final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy to
her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of
the little brown Faust-Capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight purple
velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless
victim.

Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box,
turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the
house.  Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to
attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable nights
by some of the younger members of the family.  On this occasion, the
front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lovell
Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn behind
these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically
fixed on the stagelovers.  As Madame Nilsson's "M'ama!" thrilled out
above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the
Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her brow
to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her
breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a
single gardenia.  She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of
lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her
white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly.  He drew a breath of
satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be
very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the
Opera houses of Paris and Vienna.  The foreground, to the footlights,
was covered with emerald green cloth.  In the middle distance
symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed
the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink
and red roses.  Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses,
and closely resembling the floral pen-wipers made by female
parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath
the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch
flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off
prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white
cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue
girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her
muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's
impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his
designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the
ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from
the right wing.

"The darling!" thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to the
young girl with the lilies-of-the-valley.  "She doesn't even guess what
it's all about." And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a
thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation
was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity.  "We'll
read Faust together ... by the Italian lakes ..." he thought, somewhat
hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with the
masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to
reveal to his bride.  It was only that afternoon that May Welland had
let him guess that she "cared" (New York's consecrated phrase of maiden
avowal), and already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement
ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin, pictured her at
his side in some scene of old European witchery.

He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a
simpleton.  He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to
develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own
with the most popular married women of the "younger set," in which it
was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully
discouraging it.  If he had probed to the bottom of his vanity (as he
sometimes nearly did) he would have found there the wish that his wife
should be as worldly-wise and as eager to please as the married lady
whose charms had held his fancy through two mildly agitated years;
without, of course, any hint of the frailty which had so nearly marred
that unhappy being's life, and had disarranged his own plans for a
whole winter.

How this miracle of fire and ice was to be created, and to sustain
itself in a harsh world, he had never taken the time to think out; but
he was content to hold his view without analysing it, since he knew it
was that of all the carefully-brushed, white-waistcoated,
button-hole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club
box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their
opera-glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product
of the system.  In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer
felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old
New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even
seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number.
Singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they
represented "New York," and the habit of masculine solidarity made him
accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.  He instinctively
felt that in this respect it would be troublesome--and also rather bad
form--to strike out for himself.

"Well--upon my soul!" exclaimed Lawrence Lefferts, turning his
opera-glass abruptly away from the stage.  Lawrence Lefferts was, on
the whole, the foremost authority on "form" in New York.  He had
probably devoted more time than any one else to the study of this
intricate and fascinating question; but study alone could not account
for his complete and easy competence.  One had only to look at him,
from the slant of his bald forehead and the curve of his beautiful fair
moustache to the long patent-leather feet at the other end of his lean
and elegant person, to feel that the knowledge of "form" must be
congenital in any one who knew how to wear such good clothes so
carelessly and carry such height with so much lounging grace.  As a
young admirer had once said of him:  "If anybody can tell a fellow just
when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and when not to, it's
Larry Lefferts."  And on the question of pumps versus patent-leather
"Oxfords" his authority had never been disputed.

"My God!" he said; and silently handed his glass to old Sillerton
Jackson.

Newland Archer, following Lefferts's glance, saw with surprise that his
exclamation had been occasioned by the entry of a new figure into old
Mrs. Mingott's box.  It was that of a slim young woman, a little less
tall than May Welland, with brown hair growing in close curls about her
temples and held in place by a narrow band of diamonds.  The suggestion
of this headdress, which gave her what was then called a "Josephine
look," was carried out in the cut of the dark blue velvet gown rather
theatrically caught up under her bosom by a girdle with a large
old-fashioned clasp.  The wearer of this unusual dress, who seemed
quite unconscious of the attention it was attracting, stood a moment in
the centre of the box, discussing with Mrs. Welland the propriety of
taking the latter's place in the front right-hand corner; then she
yielded with a slight smile, and seated herself in line with Mrs.
Welland's sister-in-law, Mrs. Lovell Mingott, who was installed in the
opposite corner.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson had returned the opera-glass to Lawrence
Lefferts.  The whole of the club turned instinctively, waiting to hear
what the old man had to say; for old Mr. Jackson was as great an
authority on "family" as Lawrence Lefferts was on "form."  He knew all
the ramifications of New York's cousinships; and could not only
elucidate such complicated questions as that of the connection between
the Mingotts (through the Thorleys) with the Dallases of South
Carolina, and that of the relationship of the elder branch of
Philadelphia Thorleys to the Albany Chiverses (on no account to be
confused with the Manson Chiverses of University Place), but could also
enumerate the leading characteristics of each family: as, for instance,
the fabulous stinginess of the younger lines of Leffertses (the Long
Island ones); or the fatal tendency of the Rushworths to make foolish
matches; or the insanity recurring in every second generation of the
Albany Chiverses, with whom their New York cousins had always refused
to intermarry--with the disastrous exception of poor Medora Manson,
who, as everybody knew ... but then her mother was a Rushworth.

In addition to this forest of family trees, Mr. Sillerton Jackson
carried between his narrow hollow temples, and under his soft thatch of
silver hair, a register of most of the scandals and mysteries that had
smouldered under the unruffled surface of New York society within the
last fifty years.  So far indeed did his information extend, and so
acutely retentive was his memory, that he was supposed to be the only
man who could have told you who Julius Beaufort, the banker, really
was, and what had become of handsome Bob Spicer, old Mrs. Manson
Mingott's father, who had disappeared so mysteriously (with a large sum
of trust money) less than a year after his marriage, on the very day
that a beautiful Spanish dancer who had been delighting thronged
audiences in the old Opera-house on the Battery had taken ship for
Cuba.  But these mysteries, and many others, were closely locked in Mr.
Jackson's breast; for not only did his keen sense of honour forbid his
repeating anything privately imparted, but he was fully aware that his
reputation for discretion increased his opportunities of finding out
what he wanted to know.

The club box, therefore, waited in visible suspense while Mr. Sillerton
Jackson handed back Lawrence Lefferts's opera-glass.  For a moment he
silently scrutinised the attentive group out of his filmy blue eyes
overhung by old veined lids; then he gave his moustache a thoughtful
twist, and said simply:  "I didn't think the Mingotts would have tried
it on."

It is a January evening in the early 1870s at New York City's fashionable Academy of Music -- where the conservative, old rich families come to see and be seen. Faust is the opera and the theatregoers are watching the stage, but they are also observing the delicious dramas in the exclusive boxes of old New York's First Families. Newland Archer, young lawyer and man about town, arrives stylishly late and, like his friends, observes the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott where Newland's soon-to-be fiance, May Welland, is sitting with family members. Newland considers with warmth and approval the virginal white of May's dress, gloves, and flowers. His mind leaps to the intimacies of the honeymoon and he thoughtfully considers his role as husband in initiating her into the sexual pleasures of married life. Newland is sitting with two other gentlemen of New York society: Lawrence Lefferts and Sillerton Jackson. Lefferts is an expert on social etiquette, while Jackson is the acknowledged source of information on family connections, characteristics, and scandals. Both gentlemen are staring in amazement at the Mingott box where an unknown woman has just entered and seated herself near Newland's girlfriend. Her entrance causes Jackson to question the Mingott's decision to allow her presence here among the elite of New York society.

Wharton's first chapter sets the tone of irony and hypocrisy that delineates the fabric of her old New York, the 1870s setting of The Age of Innocence. In her first, richly detailed chapter, she introduces old New York's social order, its code of conduct and superficial values, and the main characters that will interact within its boundaries. The reader begins to see a motif: New York society is composed of closely knit families that close ranks and follow behavior codes handed down from mother to daughter, father to son. Wharton opens her story in that cultural symbol of the Gilded Age, the Academy of Music. Wharton is very accurate in her knowledge of the building, the seating order, and the patrons' behavior. Because members of old New York society use the Academy of Music as a marriage market to reproduce their class and facilitate marriages within their ranks, they seat debutantes modestly near the rear of boxes. Married ladies sit near the front displaying valuable possessions -- jewels. This way others can envy the husbands who provide the jewels, and the husbands can display the wives they possess. The carefully proscribed social seasons also are a way for the old rich to retain control because interlopers -- the New Rich -- are trying to break into their ranks . It is through Newland's eyes that we view the society of 1870s New York. Ironically, Newland sees himself as cosmopolitan, but Wharton belies this sentiment by describing his acceptance of "the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists . . .  . . . translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences." This is Wharton's humor, but Newland sees this as perfectly understandable. He parts his hair "with two-silver-backed brushes with his monogram in blue" and he has a gardenia -- the socially acceptable flower -- in his buttonhole. Everything about Newland Archer screams conformity. Edith Wharton exposes the society's double standard regarding marital beliefs. May, Newland's soon-to-be fiance, is a virgin with no "past," dressed in white and carrying white lilies of the valley. In contrast, Newland takes pride in his own sexual experience gained in a previous two-year with a married  woman. May is the perfect society bride: Newland's role will be to train her in social tact, wit, and the art of "attracting masculine homage while playfully discouraging it." Ironically, Wharton mentions that if Newland dug down deeply enough in his vanity, he might realize that a sexually knowledgeable wife would be much more sophisticated and eager to please. Throughout the novel she undercuts Newland's opinions to expose the hypocrisy of the social code. While Newland broadcasts "conventional," May Welland radiates "innocence." Sitting forward, her face slightly flushed, she watches the opera whose words she likely does not understand. Wharton purposely chose an opera based on a play by Goethe where the older, more experienced Faust falls in love with the young, beautiful village girl, Marguerite, whose innocence parallels that of May Welland. May does not understand Faust's efforts to seduce Marguerite, but her romantic innocence is underscored as she looks at Newland's flowers and blushes. Watching all these actions are two minor characters, yet their presence throughout the book enforces Wharton's themes of societal hypocrisy. Lawrence Lefferts is one of the biggest hypocrites in the novel. While judging others who break the social code, he is later protected by the very code he breaks. Sillerton Jackson is a prudish, prim, and pretentious Victorian who excels at gossip and back stabbing. He, like Lefferts, uses his opera glasses to peruse the crowd and comment on their behavior. Throughout the novel these two will provide words and actions that propel the plot and sometimes cause mistaken assumptions in their social group. Glossary Above the Forties farther out from the fashionable center of the city. Mr. Luther Burbank's...prodigies students of Luther Burbank , an American plant breeder and horticulturist. chemisette a detachable shirt front formerly worn by women to fill in the neckline of a dress. Josephine look a gown in the style of the first French Empire  named after Napoleon's wife, Josephine, empress of France ; with a short waist, decollette bodice, flowing skirt, and short, puffed sleeves.


Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a
strange state of embarrassment.

It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided
attention of masculine New York should be that in which his betrothed
was seated between her mother and aunt; and for a moment he could not
identify the lady in the Empire dress, nor imagine why her presence
created such excitement among the initiated.  Then light dawned on him,
and with it came a momentary rush of indignation.  No, indeed; no one
would have thought the Mingotts would have tried it on!

But they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low-toned comments behind
him left no doubt in Archer's mind that the young woman was May
Welland's cousin, the cousin always referred to in the family as "poor
Ellen Olenska."  Archer knew that she had suddenly arrived from Europe
a day or two previously; he had even heard from Miss Welland (not
disapprovingly) that she had been to see poor Ellen, who was staying
with old Mrs. Mingott.  Archer entirely approved of family solidarity,
and one of the qualities he most admired in the Mingotts was their
resolute championship of the few black sheep that their blameless stock
had produced.  There was nothing mean or ungenerous in the young man's
heart, and he was glad that his future wife should not be restrained by
false prudery from being kind (in private) to her unhappy cousin; but
to receive Countess Olenska in the family circle was a different thing
from producing her in public, at the Opera of all places, and in the
very box with the young girl whose engagement to him, Newland Archer,
was to be announced within a few weeks.  No, he felt as old Sillerton
Jackson felt; he did not think the Mingotts would have tried it on!

He knew, of course, that whatever man dared (within Fifth Avenue's
limits) that old Mrs. Manson Mingott, the Matriarch of the line, would
dare.  He had always admired the high and mighty old lady, who, in
spite of having been only Catherine Spicer of Staten Island, with a
father mysteriously discredited, and neither money nor position enough
to make people forget it, had allied herself with the head of the
wealthy Mingott line, married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an
Italian marquis and an English banker), and put the crowning touch to
her audacities by building a large house of pale cream-coloured stone
(when brown sandstone seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in
the afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.

Old Mrs. Mingott's foreign daughters had become a legend.  They never
came back to see their mother, and the latter being, like many persons
of active mind and dominating will, sedentary and corpulent in her
habit, had philosophically remained at home.  But the cream-coloured
house (supposed to be modelled on the private hotels of the Parisian
aristocracy) was there as a visible proof of her moral courage; and she
throned in it, among pre-Revolutionary furniture and souvenirs of the
Tuileries of Louis Napoleon (where she had shone in her middle age), as
placidly as if there were nothing peculiar in living above
Thirty-fourth Street, or in having French windows that opened like
doors instead of sashes that pushed up.

Every one (including Mr. Sillerton Jackson) was agreed that old
Catherine had never had beauty--a gift which, in the eyes of New York,
justified every success, and excused a certain number of failings.
Unkind people said that, like her Imperial namesake, she had won her
way to success by strength of will and hardness of heart, and a kind of
haughty effrontery that was somehow justified by the extreme decency
and dignity of her private life.  Mr. Manson Mingott had died when she
was only twenty-eight, and had "tied up" the money with an additional
caution born of the general distrust of the Spicers; but his bold young
widow went her way fearlessly, mingled freely in foreign society,
married her daughters in heaven knew what corrupt and fashionable
circles, hobnobbed with Dukes and Ambassadors, associated familiarly
with Papists, entertained Opera singers, and was the intimate friend of
Mme. Taglioni; and all the while (as Sillerton Jackson was the first to
proclaim) there had never been a breath on her reputation; the only
respect, he always added, in which she differed from the earlier
Catherine.

Mrs. Manson Mingott had long since succeeded in untying her husband's
fortune, and had lived in affluence for half a century; but memories of
her early straits had made her excessively thrifty, and though, when
she bought a dress or a piece of furniture, she took care that it
should be of the best, she could not bring herself to spend much on the
transient pleasures of the table.  Therefore, for totally different
reasons, her food was as poor as Mrs. Archer's, and her wines did
nothing to redeem it.  Her relatives considered that the penury of her
table discredited the Mingott name, which had always been associated
with good living; but people continued to come to her in spite of the
"made dishes" and flat champagne, and in reply to the remonstrances of
her son Lovell (who tried to retrieve the family credit by having the
best chef in New York) she used to say laughingly:  "What's the use of
two good cooks in one family, now that I've married the girls and can't
eat sauces?"

Newland Archer, as he mused on these things, had once more turned his
eyes toward the Mingott box.  He saw that Mrs. Welland and her
sister-in-law were facing their semicircle of critics with the
Mingottian APLOMB which old Catherine had inculcated in all her tribe,
and that only May Welland betrayed, by a heightened colour (perhaps due
to the knowledge that he was watching her) a sense of the gravity of
the situation.  As for the cause of the commotion, she sat gracefully
in her corner of the box, her eyes fixed on the stage, and revealing,
as she leaned forward, a little more shoulder and bosom than New York
was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reasons for
wishing to pass unnoticed.

Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against
"Taste," that far-off divinity of whom "Form" was the mere visible
representative and vicegerent.  Madame Olenska's pale and serious face
appealed to his fancy as suited to the occasion and to her unhappy
situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from
her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him.  He hated to think of May
Welland's being exposed to the influence of a young woman so careless
of the dictates of Taste.

"After all," he heard one of the younger men begin behind him
(everybody talked through the Mephistopheles-and-Martha scenes), "after
all, just WHAT happened?"

"Well--she left him; nobody attempts to deny that."

"He's an awful brute, isn't he?" continued the young enquirer, a candid
Thorley, who was evidently preparing to enter the lists as the lady's
champion.

"The very worst; I knew him at Nice," said Lawrence Lefferts with
authority.  "A half-paralysed white sneering fellow--rather handsome
head, but eyes with a lot of lashes.  Well, I'll tell you the sort:
when he wasn't with women he was collecting china.  Paying any price
for both, I understand."

There was a general laugh, and the young champion said:  "Well,
then----?"

"Well, then; she bolted with his secretary."

"Oh, I see."  The champion's face fell.

"It didn't last long, though: I heard of her a few months later living
alone in Venice.  I believe Lovell Mingott went out to get her.  He
said she was desperately unhappy.  That's all right--but this parading
her at the Opera's another thing."

"Perhaps," young Thorley hazarded, "she's too unhappy to be left at
home."

This was greeted with an irreverent laugh, and the youth blushed
deeply, and tried to look as if he had meant to insinuate what knowing
people called a "double entendre."

"Well--it's queer to have brought Miss Welland, anyhow," some one said
in a low tone, with a side-glance at Archer.

"Oh, that's part of the campaign: Granny's orders, no doubt," Lefferts
laughed.  "When the old lady does a thing she does it thoroughly."

The act was ending, and there was a general stir in the box.  Suddenly
Newland Archer felt himself impelled to decisive action.  The desire to
be the first man to enter Mrs. Mingott's box, to proclaim to the
waiting world his engagement to May Welland, and to see her through
whatever difficulties her cousin's anomalous situation might involve
her in; this impulse had abruptly overruled all scruples and
hesitations, and sent him hurrying through the red corridors to the
farther side of the house.

As he entered the box his eyes met Miss Welland's, and he saw that she
had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which
both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so.
The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications
and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other
without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any
explanation would have done.  Her eyes said:  "You see why Mamma
brought me," and his answered:  "I would not for the world have had you
stay away."

"You know my niece Countess Olenska?" Mrs. Welland enquired as she
shook hands with her future son-in-law.  Archer bowed without extending
his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady; and Ellen
Olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved hands
clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers.  Having greeted Mrs. Lovell
Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down beside his
betrothed, and said in a low tone:  "I hope you've told Madame Olenska
that we're engaged?  I want everybody to know--I want you to let me
announce it this evening at the ball."

Miss Welland's face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with
radiant eyes.  "If you can persuade Mamma," she said; "but why should
we change what is already settled?"  He made no answer but that which
his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling:
"Tell my cousin yourself: I give you leave.  She says she used to play
with you when you were children."

She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a
little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see
what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska's side.

"We DID use to play together, didn't we?" she asked, turning her grave
eyes to his.  "You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a door;
but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that I
was in love with."  Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of boxes.
"Ah, how this brings it all back to me--I see everybody here in
knickerbockers and pantalettes," she said, with her trailing slightly
foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face.

Agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that they
should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before
which, at that very moment, her case was being tried.  Nothing could be
in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat
stiffly:  "Yes, you have been away a very long time."

"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure I'm
dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for reasons
he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more
disrespectful way of describing New York society.

It invariably happened in the same way.

Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to
appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night
in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and
her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every
detail of the entertainment in her absence.

The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed a
ball-room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott's and the Headly
Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought
"provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the
furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no
other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the
year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner
and its chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to
compensate for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.

Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into axioms,
had once said:  "We all have our pet common people--" and though the
phrase was a daring one, its truth was secretly admitted in many an
exclusive bosom.  But the Beauforts were not exactly common; some
people said they were even worse.  Mrs. Beaufort belonged indeed to one
of America's most honoured families; she had been the lovely Regina
Dallas (of the South Carolina branch), a penniless beauty introduced to
New York society by her cousin, the imprudent Medora Manson, who was
always doing the wrong thing from the right motive.  When one was
related to the Mansons and the Rushworths one had a "droit de cite" (as
Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who had frequented the Tuileries, called it) in
New York society; but did one not forfeit it in marrying Julius
Beaufort?

The question was: who was Beaufort?  He passed for an Englishman, was
agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty.  He had come
to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson
Mingott's English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself
an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were
dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious; and
when Medora Manson announced her cousin's engagement to him it was felt
to be one more act of folly in poor Medora's long record of imprudences.

But folly is as often justified of her children as wisdom, and two
years after young Mrs. Beaufort's marriage it was admitted that she had
the most distinguished house in New York.  No one knew exactly how the
miracle was accomplished.  She was indolent, passive, the caustic even
called her dull; but dressed like an idol, hung with pearls, growing
younger and blonder and more beautiful each year, she throned in Mr.
Beaufort's heavy brown-stone palace, and drew all the world there
without lifting her jewelled little finger.  The knowing people said it
was Beaufort himself who trained the servants, taught the chef new
dishes, told the gardeners what hot-house flowers to grow for the
dinner-table and the drawing-rooms, selected the guests, brewed the
after-dinner punch and dictated the little notes his wife wrote to her
friends.  If he did, these domestic activities were privately
performed, and he presented to the world the appearance of a careless
and hospitable millionaire strolling into his own drawing-room with the
detachment of an invited guest, and saying:  "My wife's gloxinias are a
marvel, aren't they?  I believe she gets them out from Kew."

Mr. Beaufort's secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried
things off.  It was all very well to whisper that he had been "helped"
to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had
been employed; he carried off that rumour as easily as the rest--though
New York's business conscience was no less sensitive than its moral
standard--he carried everything before him, and all New York into his
drawing-rooms, and for over twenty years now people had said they were
"going to the Beauforts'" with the same tone of security as if they had
said they were going to Mrs. Manson Mingott's, and with the added
satisfaction of knowing they would get hot canvas-back ducks and
vintage wines, instead of tepid Veuve Clicquot without a year and
warmed-up croquettes from Philadelphia.

Mrs. Beaufort, then, had as usual appeared in her box just before the
Jewel Song; and when, again as usual, she rose at the end of the third
act, drew her opera cloak about her lovely shoulders, and disappeared,
New York knew that meant that half an hour later the ball would begin.

The Beaufort house was one that New Yorkers were proud to show to
foreigners, especially on the night of the annual ball.  The Beauforts
had been among the first people in New York to own their own red velvet
carpet and have it rolled down the steps by their own footmen, under
their own awning, instead of hiring it with the supper and the
ball-room chairs.  They had also inaugurated the custom of letting the
ladies take their cloaks off in the hall, instead of shuffling up to
the hostess's bedroom and recurling their hair with the aid of the
gas-burner; Beaufort was understood to have said that he supposed all
his wife's friends had maids who saw to it that they were properly
coiffees when they left home.

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that,
instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the
Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed
drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing
from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry,
and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and
tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold
bamboo.

Newland Archer, as became a young man of his position, strolled in
somewhat late.  He had left his overcoat with the silk-stockinged
footmen (the stockings were one of Beaufort's few fatuities), had
dawdled a while in the library hung with Spanish leather and furnished
with Buhl and malachite, where a few men were chatting and putting on
their dancing-gloves, and had finally joined the line of guests whom
Mrs. Beaufort was receiving on the threshold of the crimson
drawing-room.

Archer was distinctly nervous.  He had not gone back to his club after
the Opera (as the young bloods usually did), but, the night being fine,
had walked for some distance up Fifth Avenue before turning back in the
direction of the Beauforts' house.  He was definitely afraid that the
Mingotts might be going too far; that, in fact, they might have Granny
Mingott's orders to bring the Countess Olenska to the ball.

From the tone of the club box he had perceived how grave a mistake that
would be; and, though he was more than ever determined to "see the
thing through," he felt less chivalrously eager to champion his
betrothed's cousin than before their brief talk at the Opera.

Wandering on to the bouton d'or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had
the audacity to hang "Love Victorious," the much-discussed nude of
Bouguereau) Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near
the ball-room door.  Couples were already gliding over the floor
beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on
girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes
and ornaments of the young married women's coiffures, and on the
glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.

Miss Welland, evidently about to join the dancers, hung on the
threshold, her lilies-of-the-valley in her hand (she carried no other
bouquet), her face a little pale, her eyes burning with a candid
excitement.  A group of young men and girls were gathered about her,
and there was much hand-clasping, laughing and pleasantry on which Mrs.
Welland, standing slightly apart, shed the beam of a qualified
approval.  It was evident that Miss Welland was in the act of
announcing her engagement, while her mother affected the air of
parental reluctance considered suitable to the occasion.

Archer paused a moment.  It was at his express wish that the
announcement had been made, and yet it was not thus that he would have
wished to have his happiness known.  To proclaim it in the heat and
noise of a crowded ball-room was to rob it of the fine bloom of privacy
which should belong to things nearest the heart.  His joy was so deep
that this blurring of the surface left its essence untouched; but he
would have liked to keep the surface pure too.  It was something of a
satisfaction to find that May Welland shared this feeling.  Her eyes
fled to his beseechingly, and their look said:  "Remember, we're doing
this because it's right."

No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer's
breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been
represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska.
The group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles,
and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed
into the middle of the ball-room floor and put his arm about her waist.

"Now we shan't have to talk," he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as
they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.

She made no answer.  Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes
remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision.
"Dear," Archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him
that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ball-room,
had in them something grave and sacramental.  What a new life it was
going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one's side!

The dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into
the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and
camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips.

"You see I did as you asked me to," she said.

"Yes: I couldn't wait," he answered smiling.  After a moment he added:
"Only I wish it hadn't had to be at a ball."

"Yes, I know."  She met his glance comprehendingly.  "But after
all--even here we're alone together, aren't we?"

"Oh, dearest--always!" Archer cried.

Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going to
say the right thing.  The discovery made the cup of his bliss overflow,
and he went on gaily:  "The worst of it is that I want to kiss you and
I can't."  As he spoke he took a swift glance about the conservatory,
assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching her to him
laid a fugitive pressure on her lips.  To counteract the audacity of
this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less secluded part of
the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a
lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet.  She sat silent, and the world lay
like a sunlit valley at their feet.

"Did you tell my cousin Ellen?" she asked presently, as if she spoke
through a dream.

He roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so.  Some
invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign
woman had checked the words on his lips.

"No--I hadn't the chance after all," he said, fibbing hastily.

"Ah."  She looked disappointed, but gently resolved on gaining her
point.  "You must, then, for I didn't either; and I shouldn't like her
to think--"

"Of course not.  But aren't you, after all, the person to do it?"

She pondered on this.  "If I'd done it at the right time, yes: but now
that there's been a delay I think you must explain that I'd asked you
to tell her at the Opera, before our speaking about it to everybody
here.  Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her.  You see, she's
one of the family, and she's been away so long that she's
rather--sensitive."

Archer looked at her glowingly.  "Dear and great angel!  Of course I'll
tell her."  He glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded
ball-room.  "But I haven't seen her yet.  Has she come?"

"No; at the last minute she decided not to."

"At the last minute?" he echoed, betraying his surprise that she should
ever have considered the alternative possible.

"Yes.  She's awfully fond of dancing," the young girl answered simply.
"But suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn't smart enough
for a ball, though we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take
her home."

"Oh, well--" said Archer with happy indifference.  Nothing about his
betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to
its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the "unpleasant" in which they
had both been brought up.

"She knows as well as I do," he reflected, "the real reason of her
cousin's staying away; but I shall never let her see by the least sign
that I am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen
Olenska's reputation."

Newland is feeling embarrassed because the males in the audience are watching the Mingott box and he is trying to decide on a course of action to protect his beloved May from scandal. He realizes that the mystery lady must be May's cousin, the Countess Ellen Olenska, who recently arrived from Europe. Disgracefully, she has left her husband and is staying with her grandmother, old Mrs. Mingott. While Newland approves of family loyalty in private, he would prefer the Wellands not exercise it in public with the "black sheep" of the family. Newland listens to the other men make jokes about Ellen's past and his embarrassment grows. He waits for the curtain to signal the end of the act and does the loyal and manly thing: He dashes for the Mingott family box where May gratefully consents to his request that he announce their engagement. She then introduces him to her cousin, Ellen, who recounts tales of them playing together as children. Newland interprets her attitude toward New Yorkers as flippant and it irritates him. After the third act, Mrs. Regina Beaufort leaves the opera house as a signal that her annual ball will begin in thirty minutes. Regina is from the South Carolina Dallas family, a "penniless beauty" who is not too bright, but her looks are stunning. Introduced to New York society by a cousin, Medora Manson, she married Julius Beaufort, who came with a doubtful past. He is known to enjoy the company of women other than his wife. Arriving at the Beaufort home, Newland describes their sumptuous rooms and possessions, but he is having second thoughts about family loyalty. May calms his unspoken fears by explaining that the Countess excused herself because her dress was not fashionable enough to attend such a party. Relieved by this information, Newland decides that May shares his viewpoint about dealing with this "unpleasantness;" what a perfect wife for any man to possess!

Wharton increasingly pulls the reader into a world of conflicts and hypocrisy. The old New Yorkers are both drawn and repulsed by the money and possessions of the New Rich, as symbolized by Julius Beaufort's rise in social status. Though old Mrs. Mingott's English son-in-law sent letters of introduction with Beaufort, rumors circulate about his "dissipated habits" and cynicism. Speculation holds that he left an English banking house under questionable circumstances. His affairs with women and shady past are disregarded because he carries things off with style. The Old Rich tolerate the Beauforts because they have a ballroom that is used just for one night and closed off the other 364 days a year. "Few things seem more awful to Newland than an offence against Taste." He finds Ellen's words distasteful as she humorously mentions that New York will be judging her. But that is exactly what his friends did in snickering about her past. Who knows what scandalous things she has been doing in Europe as a woman alone, and now she is here at the opera pretending to be a person of taste! Here the reader sees clearly the double standard of society and Newland's complicity: toleration for Julius Beaufort and contempt for Ellen Olenska. Glossary double entendre a term with two meanings, especially when one of them has a risque or indecorous connotation. bouton d'or  golden or lustrous buttons; here, part of the interior decor that causes lustre and glitter. aigrettes bunches of the long, white showy plumes of the egret, worn for ornament on a hat or in the hair.