"Ol-ol--howjer spell it, anyhow?" asked the tart young lady to whom
Archer had pushed his wife's telegram across the brass ledge of the
Western Union office.

"Olenska--O-len-ska," he repeated, drawing back the message in order to
print out the foreign syllables above May's rambling script.

"It's an unlikely name for a New York telegraph office; at least in
this quarter," an unexpected voice observed; and turning around Archer
saw Lawrence Lefferts at his elbow, pulling an imperturbable moustache
and affecting not to glance at the message.

"Hallo, Newland: thought I'd catch you here.  I've just heard of old
Mrs. Mingott's stroke; and as I was on my way to the house I saw you
turning down this street and nipped after you.  I suppose you've come
from there?"

Archer nodded, and pushed his telegram under the lattice.

"Very bad, eh?" Lefferts continued.  "Wiring to the family, I suppose.
I gather it IS bad, if you're including Countess Olenska."

Archer's lips stiffened; he felt a savage impulse to dash his fist into
the long vain handsome face at his side.

"Why?" he questioned.

Lefferts, who was known to shrink from discussion, raised his eye-brows
with an ironic grimace that warned the other of the watching damsel
behind the lattice.  Nothing could be worse "form" the look reminded
Archer, than any display of temper in a public place.

Archer had never been more indifferent to the requirements of form; but
his impulse to do Lawrence Lefferts a physical injury was only
momentary.  The idea of bandying Ellen Olenska's name with him at such
a time, and on whatsoever provocation, was unthinkable.  He paid for
his telegram, and the two young men went out together into the street.
There Archer, having regained his self-control, went on:  "Mrs. Mingott
is much better: the doctor feels no anxiety whatever"; and Lefferts,
with profuse expressions of relief, asked him if he had heard that
there were beastly bad rumours again about Beaufort....

That afternoon the announcement of the Beaufort failure was in all the
papers.  It overshadowed the report of Mrs. Manson Mingott's stroke,
and only the few who had heard of the mysterious connection between the
two events thought of ascribing old Catherine's illness to anything but
the accumulation of flesh and years.

The whole of New York was darkened by the tale of Beaufort's dishonour.
There had never, as Mr. Letterblair said, been a worse case in his
memory, nor, for that matter, in the memory of the far-off Letterblair
who had given his name to the firm.  The bank had continued to take in
money for a whole day after its failure was inevitable; and as many of
its clients belonged to one or another of the ruling clans, Beaufort's
duplicity seemed doubly cynical.  If Mrs. Beaufort had not taken the
tone that such misfortunes (the word was her own) were "the test of
friendship," compassion for her might have tempered the general
indignation against her husband.  As it was--and especially after the
object of her nocturnal visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott had become
known--her cynicism was held to exceed his; and she had not the
excuse--nor her detractors the satisfaction--of pleading that she was
"a foreigner."  It was some comfort (to those whose securities were not
in jeopardy) to be able to remind themselves that Beaufort WAS; but,
after all, if a Dallas of South Carolina took his view of the case, and
glibly talked of his soon being "on his feet again," the argument lost
its edge, and there was nothing to do but to accept this awful evidence
of the indissolubility of marriage.  Society must manage to get on
without the Beauforts, and there was an end of it--except indeed for
such hapless victims of the disaster as Medora Manson, the poor old
Miss Lannings, and certain other misguided ladies of good family who,
if only they had listened to Mr. Henry van der Luyden ...

"The best thing the Beauforts can do," said Mrs. Archer, summing it up
as if she were pronouncing a diagnosis and prescribing a course of
treatment, "is to go and live at Regina's little place in North
Carolina.  Beaufort has always kept a racing stable, and he had better
breed trotting horses.  I should say he had all the qualities of a
successful horsedealer."  Every one agreed with her, but no one
condescended to enquire what the Beauforts really meant to do.

The next day Mrs. Manson Mingott was much better: she recovered her
voice sufficiently to give orders that no one should mention the
Beauforts to her again, and asked--when Dr. Bencomb appeared--what in
the world her family meant by making such a fuss about her health.

"If people of my age WILL eat chicken-salad in the evening what are
they to expect?" she enquired; and, the doctor having opportunely
modified her dietary, the stroke was transformed into an attack of
indigestion.  But in spite of her firm tone old Catherine did not
wholly recover her former attitude toward life.  The growing remoteness
of old age, though it had not diminished her curiosity about her
neighbours, had blunted her never very lively compassion for their
troubles; and she seemed to have no difficulty in putting the Beaufort
disaster out of her mind.  But for the first time she became absorbed
in her own symptoms, and began to take a sentimental interest in
certain members of her family to whom she had hitherto been
contemptuously indifferent.

Mr. Welland, in particular, had the privilege of attracting her notice.
Of her sons-in-law he was the one she had most consistently ignored;
and all his wife's efforts to represent him as a man of forceful
character and marked intellectual ability (if he had only "chosen") had
been met with a derisive chuckle.  But his eminence as a valetudinarian
now made him an object of engrossing interest, and Mrs. Mingott issued
an imperial summons to him to come and compare diets as soon as his
temperature permitted; for old Catherine was now the first to recognise
that one could not be too careful about temperatures.

Twenty-four hours after Madame Olenska's summons a telegram announced
that she would arrive from Washington on the evening of the following
day.  At the Wellands', where the Newland Archers chanced to be
lunching, the question as to who should meet her at Jersey City was
immediately raised; and the material difficulties amid which the
Welland household struggled as if it had been a frontier outpost, lent
animation to the debate.  It was agreed that Mrs. Welland could not
possibly go to Jersey City because she was to accompany her husband to
old Catherine's that afternoon, and the brougham could not be spared,
since, if Mr. Welland were "upset" by seeing his mother-in-law for the
first time after her attack, he might have to be taken home at a
moment's notice.  The Welland sons would of course be "down town," Mr.
Lovell Mingott would be just hurrying back from his shooting, and the
Mingott carriage engaged in meeting him; and one could not ask May, at
the close of a winter afternoon, to go alone across the ferry to Jersey
City, even in her own carriage.  Nevertheless, it might appear
inhospitable--and contrary to old Catherine's express wishes--if Madame
Olenska were allowed to arrive without any of the family being at the
station to receive her.  It was just like Ellen, Mrs. Welland's tired
voice implied, to place the family in such a dilemma.  "It's always one
thing after another," the poor lady grieved, in one of her rare revolts
against fate; "the only thing that makes me think Mamma must be less
well than Dr. Bencomb will admit is this morbid desire to have Ellen
come at once, however inconvenient it is to meet her."

The words had been thoughtless, as the utterances of impatience often
are; and Mr. Welland was upon them with a pounce.

"Augusta," he said, turning pale and laying down his fork, "have you
any other reason for thinking that Bencomb is less to be relied on than
he was?  Have you noticed that he has been less conscientious than
usual in following up my case or your mother's?"

It was Mrs. Welland's turn to grow pale as the endless consequences of
her blunder unrolled themselves before her; but she managed to laugh,
and take a second helping of scalloped oysters, before she said,
struggling back into her old armour of cheerfulness: "My dear, how
could you imagine such a thing?  I only meant that, after the decided
stand Mamma took about its being Ellen's duty to go back to her
husband, it seems strange that she should be seized with this sudden
whim to see her, when there are half a dozen other grandchildren that
she might have asked for.  But we must never forget that Mamma, in
spite of her wonderful vitality, is a very old woman."

Mr. Welland's brow remained clouded, and it was evident that his
perturbed imagination had fastened at once on this last remark.  "Yes:
your mother's a very old woman; and for all we know Bencomb may not be
as successful with very old people.  As you say, my dear, it's always
one thing after another; and in another ten or fifteen years I suppose
I shall have the pleasing duty of looking about for a new doctor.  It's
always better to make such a change before it's absolutely necessary."
And having arrived at this Spartan decision Mr. Welland firmly took up
his fork.

"But all the while," Mrs. Welland began again, as she rose from the
luncheon-table, and led the way into the wilderness of purple satin and
malachite known as the back drawing-room, "I don't see how Ellen's to
be got here tomorrow evening; and I do like to have things settled for
at least twenty-four hours ahead."

Archer turned from the fascinated contemplation of a small painting
representing two Cardinals carousing, in an octagonal ebony frame set
with medallions of onyx.

"Shall I fetch her?" he proposed.  "I can easily get away from the
office in time to meet the brougham at the ferry, if May will send it
there."  His heart was beating excitedly as he spoke.

Mrs. Welland heaved a sigh of gratitude, and May, who had moved away to
the window, turned to shed on him a beam of approval.  "So you see,
Mamma, everything WILL be settled twenty-four hours in advance," she
said, stooping over to kiss her mother's troubled forehead.

May's brougham awaited her at the door, and she was to drive Archer to
Union Square, where he could pick up a Broadway car to carry him to the
office.  As she settled herself in her corner she said:  "I didn't want
to worry Mamma by raising fresh obstacles; but how can you meet Ellen
tomorrow, and bring her back to New York, when you're going to
Washington?"

"Oh, I'm not going," Archer answered.

"Not going?  Why, what's happened?"  Her voice was as clear as a bell,
and full of wifely solicitude.

"The case is off--postponed."

"Postponed?  How odd!  I saw a note this morning from Mr. Letterblair
to Mamma saying that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big
patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme Court.  You said it
was a patent case, didn't you?"

"Well--that's it: the whole office can't go.  Letterblair decided to go
this morning."

"Then it's NOT postponed?" she continued, with an insistence so unlike
her that he felt the blood rising to his face, as if he were blushing
for her unwonted lapse from all the traditional delicacies.

"No: but my going is," he answered, cursing the unnecessary
explanations that he had given when he had announced his intention of
going to Washington, and wondering where he had read that clever liars
give details, but that the cleverest do not.  It did not hurt him half
as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she
had not detected him.

"I'm not going till later on: luckily for the convenience of your
family," he continued, taking base refuge in sarcasm.  As he spoke he
felt that she was looking at him, and he turned his eyes to hers in
order not to appear to be avoiding them.  Their glances met for a
second, and perhaps let them into each other's meanings more deeply
than either cared to go.

"Yes; it IS awfully convenient," May brightly agreed, "that you should
be able to meet Ellen after all; you saw how much Mamma appreciated
your offering to do it."

"Oh, I'm delighted to do it."  The carriage stopped, and as he jumped
out she leaned to him and laid her hand on his.  "Good-bye, dearest,"
she said, her eyes so blue that he wondered afterward if they had shone
on him through tears.

He turned away and hurried across Union Square, repeating to himself,
in a sort of inward chant:  "It's all of two hours from Jersey City to
old Catherine's.  It's all of two hours--and it may be more."

His wife's dark blue brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it)
met Archer at the ferry, and conveyed him luxuriously to the
Pennsylvania terminus in Jersey City.

It was a sombre snowy afternoon, and the gas-lamps were lit in the big
reverberating station.  As he paced the platform, waiting for the
Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought
there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the
trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York.
They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the
building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the
invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic
communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.

"I don't care which of their visions comes true," Archer mused, "as
long as the tunnel isn't built yet."  In his senseless school-boy
happiness he pictured Madame Olenska's descent from the train, his
discovery of her a long way off, among the throngs of meaningless
faces, her clinging to his arm as he guided her to the carriage, their
slow approach to the wharf among slipping horses, laden carts,
vociferating teamsters, and then the startling quiet of the ferry-boat,
where they would sit side by side under the snow, in the motionless
carriage, while the earth seemed to glide away under them, rolling to
the other side of the sun.  It was incredible, the number of things he
had to say to her, and in what eloquent order they were forming
themselves on his lips ...

The clanging and groaning of the train came nearer, and it staggered
slowly into the station like a prey-laden monster into its lair.
Archer pushed forward, elbowing through the crowd, and staring blindly
into window after window of the high-hung carriages.  And then,
suddenly, he saw Madame Olenska's pale and surprised face close at
hand, and had again the mortified sensation of having forgotten what
she looked like.

They reached each other, their hands met, and he drew her arm through
his.  "This way--I have the carriage," he said.

After that it all happened as he had dreamed.  He helped her into the
brougham with her bags, and had afterward the vague recollection of
having properly reassured her about her grandmother and given her a
summary of the Beaufort situation (he was struck by the softness of
her:  "Poor Regina!").  Meanwhile the carriage had worked its way out
of the coil about the station, and they were crawling down the slippery
incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying coal-carts, bewildered horses,
dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty hearse--ah, that hearse!  She
shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at Archer's hand.

"If only it doesn't mean--poor Granny!"

"Oh, no, no--she's much better--she's all right, really.  There--we've
passed it!" he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference.  Her hand
remained in his, and as the carriage lurched across the gang-plank onto
the ferry he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown glove, and kissed
her palm as if he had kissed a relic.  She disengaged herself with a
faint smile, and he said: "You didn't expect me today?"

"Oh, no."

"I meant to go to Washington to see you.  I'd made all my
arrangements--I very nearly crossed you in the train."

"Oh--" she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape.

"Do you know--I hardly remembered you?"

"Hardly remembered me?"

"I mean: how shall I explain?  I--it's always so.  EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN
TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN."

"Oh, yes: I know!  I know!"

"Does it--do I too: to you?" he insisted.

She nodded, looking out of the window.

"Ellen--Ellen--Ellen!"

She made no answer, and he sat in silence, watching her profile grow
indistinct against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window.  What had
she been doing in all those four long months, he wondered?  How little
they knew of each other, after all!  The precious moments were slipping
away, but he had forgotten everything that he had meant to say to her
and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and
their proximity, which seemed to be symbolised by the fact of their
sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable to see each
other's faces.

"What a pretty carriage!  Is it May's?" she asked, suddenly turning her
face from the window.

"Yes."

"It was May who sent you to fetch me, then?  How kind of her!"

He made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively:  "Your
husband's secretary came to see me the day after we met in Boston."

In his brief letter to her he had made no allusion to M. Riviere's
visit, and his intention had been to bury the incident in his bosom.
But her reminder that they were in his wife's carriage provoked him to
an impulse of retaliation.  He would see if she liked his reference to
Riviere any better than he liked hers to May!  As on certain other
occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure,
she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded:  "He writes
to her, then."

"M. Riviere went to see you?"

"Yes: didn't you know?"

"No," she answered simply.

"And you're not surprised?"

She hesitated.  "Why should I be?  He told me in Boston that he knew
you; that he'd met you in England I think."

"Ellen--I must ask you one thing."

"Yes."

"I wanted to ask it after I saw him, but I couldn't put it in a letter.
It was Riviere who helped you to get away--when you left your husband?"

His heart was beating suffocatingly.  Would she meet this question with
the same composure?

"Yes: I owe him a great debt," she answered, without the least tremor
in her quiet voice.

Her tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that Archer's turmoil
subsided.  Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make
him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging
convention to the winds.

"I think you're the most honest woman I ever met!" he exclaimed.

"Oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in
her voice.

"Call it what you like: you look at things as they are."

"Ah--I've had to.  I've had to look at the Gorgon."

"Well--it hasn't blinded you!  You've seen that she's just an old bogey
like all the others."

"She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears."

The answer checked the pleading on Archer's lips: it seemed to come
from depths of experience beyond his reach.  The slow advance of the
ferry-boat had ceased, and her bows bumped against the piles of the
slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger, and flung Archer
and Madame Olenska against each other.  The young man, trembling, felt
the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his arm about her.

"If you're not blind, then, you must see that this can't last."

"What can't?"

"Our being together--and not together."

"No.  You ought not to have come today," she said in an altered voice;
and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him and pressed her lips
to his.  At the same moment the carriage began to move, and a gas-lamp
at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window.  She drew
away, and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled
through the congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing.  As they
gained the street Archer began to speak hurriedly.

"Don't be afraid of me: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your
corner like that.  A stolen kiss isn't what I want.  Look: I'm not even
trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket.  Don't suppose that I don't
understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us
dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair.  I couldn't have
spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm
looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great
flame.  But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered,
and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now
and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit
perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my
mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true."

For a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper:
"What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?"

"Why--you know it will, don't you?"

"Your vision of you and me together?"  She burst into a sudden hard
laugh.  "You choose your place well to put it to me!"

"Do you mean because we're in my wife's brougham?  Shall we get out and
walk, then?  I don't suppose you mind a little snow?"

She laughed again, more gently.  "No; I shan't get out and walk,
because my business is to get to Granny's as quickly as I can.  And
you'll sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."

"I don't know what you mean by realities.  The only reality to me is
this."

She met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled
down an obscure side-street and then turned into the searching
illumination of Fifth Avenue.

"Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your
mistress--since I can't be your wife?" she asked.

The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women
of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about
the topic.  He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a
recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used
familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from.  Her
question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.

"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words
like that--categories like that--won't exist.  Where we shall be simply
two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each
other; and nothing else on earth will matter."

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh.  "Oh, my dear--where
is that country?  Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he
remained sullenly dumb she went on:  "I know so many who've tried to
find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside
stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it
wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather
smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."

He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the
phrase she had used a little while before.

"Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears," he said.

"Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds
people.  What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids
open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.  Isn't there
a Chinese torture like that?  There ought to be.  Ah, believe me, it's
a miserable little country!"

The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May's sturdy
brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky
trotter.  Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.

"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.

"For US?  But there's no US in that sense!  We're near each other only
if we stay far from each other.  Then we can be ourselves.  Otherwise
we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and
Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy
behind the backs of the people who trust them."

"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.

"No, you're not!  You've never been beyond.  And I have," she said, in
a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."

He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain.  Then he groped in the
darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to
the coachman.  He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to
stop.  He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the
curbstone.

"Why are we stopping?  This is not Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.

"No: I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping
to the pavement.  By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled
face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him.  He closed the
door, and leaned for a moment in the window.

"You're right: I ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his
voice so that the coachman should not hear.  She bent forward, and
seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive
on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner.  The
snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face
as he stood gazing.  Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his
lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had
frozen his tears.

He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down
Fifth Avenue to his own house.

That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the
drawing-room empty.

He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been
postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott's illness; and as May was the more
punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him.  He
knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving
about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.

He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means
of tying his thoughts fast to reality.  Sometimes he felt as if he had
found the clue to his father-in-law's absorption in trifles; perhaps
even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had
conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.

When May appeared he thought she looked tired.  She had put on the
low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial
exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair
into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan
and almost faded.  But she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and
her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before.

"What became of you, dear?" she asked.  "I was waiting at Granny's, and
Ellen came alone, and said she had dropped you on the way because you
had to rush off on business.  There's nothing wrong?"

"Only some letters I'd forgotten, and wanted to get off before dinner."

"Ah--" she said; and a moment afterward:  "I'm sorry you didn't come to
Granny's--unless the letters were urgent."

"They were," he rejoined, surprised at her insistence.  "Besides, I
don't see why I should have gone to your grandmother's.  I didn't know
you were there."

She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the mantel-piece.  As
she stood there, lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had slipped
from its place in her intricate hair, Archer was struck by something
languid and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly
monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also.  Then he
remembered that, as he had left the house that morning, she had called
over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother's so that
they might drive home together.  He had called back a cheery "Yes!" and
then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise.  Now he was
smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission
should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage.  He
was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the
temperature of passion yet with all its exactions.  If May had spoken
out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed
them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a
Spartan smile.

To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her grandmother was, and she
answered that Mrs. Mingott was still improving, but had been rather
disturbed by the last news about the Beauforts.

"What news?"

"It seems they're going to stay in New York.  I believe he's going into
an insurance business, or something.  They're looking about for a small
house."

The preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion, and they went
in to dinner.  During dinner their talk moved in its usual limited
circle; but Archer noticed that his wife made no allusion to Madame
Olenska, nor to old Catherine's reception of her.  He was thankful for
the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous.

They went up to the library for coffee, and Archer lit a cigar and took
down a volume of Michelet.  He had taken to history in the evenings
since May had shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever she
saw him with a volume of poetry: not that he disliked the sound of his
own voice, but because he could always foresee her comments on what he
read.  In the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now
perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had ceased to provide
her with opinions she had begun to hazard her own, with results
destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on.

Seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her workbasket, drew up
an arm-chair to the green-shaded student lamp, and uncovered a cushion
she was embroidering for his sofa.  She was not a clever needle-woman;
her large capable hands were made for riding, rowing and open-air
activities; but since other wives embroidered cushions for their
husbands she did not wish to omit this last link in her devotion.

She was so placed that Archer, by merely raising his eyes, could see
her bent above her work-frame, her ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back
from her firm round arms, the betrothal sapphire shining on her left
hand above her broad gold wedding-ring, and the right hand slowly and
laboriously stabbing the canvas.  As she sat thus, the lamplight full
on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he
would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years
to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a
weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.  She had spent her poetry and
romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the
need was past.  Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother,
and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr.
Welland.  He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once
she raised her head.

"What's the matter?"

"The room is stifling: I want a little air."

He had insisted that the library curtains should draw backward and
forward on a rod, so that they might be closed in the evening, instead
of remaining nailed to a gilt cornice, and immovably looped up over
layers of lace, as in the drawing-room; and he pulled them back and
pushed up the sash, leaning out into the icy night.  The mere fact of
not looking at May, seated beside his table, under his lamp, the fact
of seeing other houses, roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other
lives outside his own, other cities beyond New York, and a whole world
beyond his world, cleared his brain and made it easier to breathe.

After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few minutes he heard
her say:  "Newland!  Do shut the window.  You'll catch your death."

He pulled the sash down and turned back.  "Catch my death!" he echoed;
and he felt like adding:  "But I've caught it already.  I AM dead--I've
been dead for months and months."

And suddenly the play of the word flashed up a wild suggestion.  What
if it were SHE who was dead!  If she were going to die--to die
soon--and leave him free!  The sensation of standing there, in that
warm familiar room, and looking at her, and wishing her dead, was so
strange, so fascinating and overmastering, that its enormity did not
immediately strike him.  He simply felt that chance had given him a new
possibility to which his sick soul might cling.  Yes, May might
die--people did: young people, healthy people like herself: she might
die, and set him suddenly free.

She glanced up, and he saw by her widening eyes that there must be
something strange in his own.

"Newland!  Are you ill?"

He shook his head and turned toward his arm-chair.  She bent over her
work-frame, and as he passed he laid his hand on her hair.  "Poor May!"
he said.

"Poor?  Why poor?" she echoed with a strained laugh.

"Because I shall never be able to open a window without worrying you,"
he rejoined, laughing also.

For a moment she was silent; then she said very low, her head bowed
over her work:  "I shall never worry if you're happy."

"Ah, my dear; and I shall never be happy unless I can open the windows!"

"In THIS weather?" she remonstrated; and with a sigh he buried his head
in his book.

Six or seven days passed.  Archer heard nothing from Madame Olenska,
and became aware that her name would not be mentioned in his presence
by any member of the family.  He did not try to see her; to do so while
she was at old Catherine's guarded bedside would have been almost
impossible.  In the uncertainty of the situation he let himself drift,
conscious, somewhere below the surface of his thoughts, of a resolve
which had come to him when he had leaned out from his library window
into the icy night.  The strength of that resolve made it easy to wait
and make no sign.

Then one day May told him that Mrs. Manson Mingott had asked to see
him.  There was nothing surprising in the request, for the old lady was
steadily recovering, and she had always openly declared that she
preferred Archer to any of her other grandsons-in-law.  May gave the
message with evident pleasure: she was proud of old Catherine's
appreciation of her husband.

There was a moment's pause, and then Archer felt it incumbent on him to
say:  "All right.  Shall we go together this afternoon?"

His wife's face brightened, but she instantly answered: "Oh, you'd much
better go alone.  It bores Granny to see the same people too often."

Archer's heart was beating violently when he rang old Mrs. Mingott's
bell.  He had wanted above all things to go alone, for he felt sure the
visit would give him the chance of saying a word in private to the
Countess Olenska.  He had determined to wait till the chance presented
itself naturally; and here it was, and here he was on the doorstep.
Behind the door, behind the curtains of the yellow damask room next to
the hall, she was surely awaiting him; in another moment he should see
her, and be able to speak to her before she led him to the sick-room.

He wanted only to put one question: after that his course would be
clear.  What he wished to ask was simply the date of her return to
Washington; and that question she could hardly refuse to answer.

But in the yellow sitting-room it was the mulatto maid who waited.  Her
white teeth shining like a keyboard, she pushed back the sliding doors
and ushered him into old Catherine's presence.

The old woman sat in a vast throne-like arm-chair near her bed.  Beside
her was a mahogany stand bearing a cast bronze lamp with an engraved
globe, over which a green paper shade had been balanced.  There was not
a book or a newspaper in reach, nor any evidence of feminine
employment: conversation had always been Mrs. Mingott's sole pursuit,
and she would have scorned to feign an interest in fancywork.

Archer saw no trace of the slight distortion left by her stroke.  She
merely looked paler, with darker shadows in the folds and recesses of
her obesity; and, in the fluted mob-cap tied by a starched bow between
her first two chins, and the muslin kerchief crossed over her billowing
purple dressing-gown, she seemed like some shrewd and kindly ancestress
of her own who might have yielded too freely to the pleasures of the
table.

She held out one of the little hands that nestled in a hollow of her
huge lap like pet animals, and called to the maid:  "Don't let in any
one else.  If my daughters call, say I'm asleep."

The maid disappeared, and the old lady turned to her grandson.

"My dear, am I perfectly hideous?" she asked gaily, launching out one
hand in search of the folds of muslin on her inaccessible bosom.  "My
daughters tell me it doesn't matter at my age--as if hideousness didn't
matter all the more the harder it gets to conceal!"

"My dear, you're handsomer than ever!" Archer rejoined in the same
tone; and she threw back her head and laughed.

"Ah, but not as handsome as Ellen!" she jerked out, twinkling at him
maliciously; and before he could answer she added:  "Was she so awfully
handsome the day you drove her up from the ferry?"

He laughed, and she continued:  "Was it because you told her so that
she had to put you out on the way?  In my youth young men didn't desert
pretty women unless they were made to!"  She gave another chuckle, and
interrupted it to say almost querulously:  "It's a pity she didn't
marry you; I always told her so.  It would have spared me all this
worry.  But who ever thought of sparing their grandmother worry?"

Archer wondered if her illness had blurred her faculties; but suddenly
she broke out:  "Well, it's settled, anyhow: she's going to stay with
me, whatever the rest of the family say!  She hadn't been here five
minutes before I'd have gone down on my knees to keep her--if only, for
the last twenty years, I'd been able to see where the floor was!"

Archer listened in silence, and she went on:  "They'd talked me over,
as no doubt you know: persuaded me, Lovell, and Letterblair, and
Augusta Welland, and all the rest of them, that I must hold out and cut
off her allowance, till she was made to see that it was her duty to go
back to Olenski.  They thought they'd convinced me when the secretary,
or whatever he was, came out with the last proposals: handsome
proposals I confess they were.  After all, marriage is marriage, and
money's money--both useful things in their way ... and I didn't know
what to answer--"  She broke off and drew a long breath, as if speaking
had become an effort.  "But the minute I laid eyes on her, I said:
'You sweet bird, you!  Shut you up in that cage again?  Never!'  And
now it's settled that she's to stay here and nurse her Granny as long
as there's a Granny to nurse.  It's not a gay prospect, but she doesn't
mind; and of course I've told Letterblair that she's to be given her
proper allowance."

The young man heard her with veins aglow; but in his confusion of mind
he hardly knew whether her news brought joy or pain.  He had so
definitely decided on the course he meant to pursue that for the moment
he could not readjust his thoughts.  But gradually there stole over him
the delicious sense of difficulties deferred and opportunities
miraculously provided.  If Ellen had consented to come and live with
her grandmother it must surely be because she had recognised the
impossibility of giving him up.  This was her answer to his final
appeal of the other day: if she would not take the extreme step he had
urged, she had at last yielded to half-measures.  He sank back into the
thought with the involuntary relief of a man who has been ready to risk
everything, and suddenly tastes the dangerous sweetness of security.

"She couldn't have gone back--it was impossible!" he exclaimed.

"Ah, my dear, I always knew you were on her side; and that's why I sent
for you today, and why I said to your pretty wife, when she proposed to
come with you: 'No, my dear, I'm pining to see Newland, and I don't
want anybody to share our transports.'  For you see, my dear--" she
drew her head back as far as its tethering chins permitted, and looked
him full in the eyes--"you see, we shall have a fight yet.  The family
don't want her here, and they'll say it's because I've been ill,
because I'm a weak old woman, that she's persuaded me.  I'm not well
enough yet to fight them one by one, and you've got to do it for me."

"I?" he stammered.

"You.  Why not?" she jerked back at him, her round eyes suddenly as
sharp as pen-knives.  Her hand fluttered from its chair-arm and lit on
his with a clutch of little pale nails like bird-claws.  "Why not?" she
searchingly repeated.

Archer, under the exposure of her gaze, had recovered his
self-possession.

"Oh, I don't count--I'm too insignificant."

"Well, you're Letterblair's partner, ain't you?  You've got to get at
them through Letterblair.  Unless you've got a reason," she insisted.

"Oh, my dear, I back you to hold your own against them all without my
help; but you shall have it if you need it," he reassured her.

"Then we're safe!" she sighed; and smiling on him with all her ancient
cunning she added, as she settled her head among the cushions:  "I
always knew you'd back us up, because they never quote you when they
talk about its being her duty to go home."

He winced a little at her terrifying perspicacity, and longed to ask:
"And May--do they quote her?"  But he judged it safer to turn the
question.

"And Madame Olenska?  When am I to see her?" he said.

The old lady chuckled, crumpled her lids, and went through the
pantomime of archness.  "Not today.  One at a time, please.  Madame
Olenska's gone out."

He flushed with disappointment, and she went on: "She's gone out, my
child: gone in my carriage to see Regina Beaufort."

She paused for this announcement to produce its effect.  "That's what
she's reduced me to already.  The day after she got here she put on her
best bonnet, and told me, as cool as a cucumber, that she was going to
call on Regina Beaufort.  'I don't know her; who is she?' says I.
'She's your grand-niece, and a most unhappy woman,' she says.  'She's
the wife of a scoundrel,' I answered.  'Well,' she says, 'and so am I,
and yet all my family want me to go back to him.'  Well, that floored
me, and I let her go; and finally one day she said it was raining too
hard to go out on foot, and she wanted me to lend her my carriage.
'What for?' I asked her; and she said: 'To go and see cousin
Regina'--COUSIN!  Now, my dear, I looked out of the window, and saw it
wasn't raining a drop; but I understood her, and I let her have the
carriage....  After all, Regina's a brave woman, and so is she; and
I've always liked courage above everything."

Archer bent down and pressed his lips on the little hand that still lay
on his.

"Eh--eh--eh!  Whose hand did you think you were kissing, young
man--your wife's, I hope?" the old lady snapped out with her mocking
cackle; and as he rose to go she called out after him:  "Give her her
Granny's love; but you'd better not say anything about our talk."

Archer is directed to send a telegram to Ellen to request her to come to New York. A day later, she responds that she will be arriving from Washington the following evening. After some debate over who will pick her up from the station, Archer offers to meet her. That evening, May wonders how Archer can possibly meet her when he is planning to be in Washington himself the following day. He responds that the trial has been postponed, but he realizes that his sloppy attempts to cover his fabrications have not escaped May's notice. Meanwhile, the situation for the Beauforts remains very bleak. Beaufort is revealed to be a very duplicitous character by continuing to accept funds after his failure became apparent. His wife has also fallen from the good graces of New York society. Her plea to her friends and her family that they not abandon her in the midst of her misfortune is seen as socially unacceptable. Old New York is resolute that it must manage to make due without the entertainment provided by the Beauforts. Meeting Ellen at the train station, Archer is surprised to find that he hardly remembers what Ellen looked like. In the carriage, he mentions that Olenski's emissary, the French tutor, had been to see him in New York. Ellen confirms that it was he who had helped her escape from her husband but does not give any indication that their relationship went further than this. Archer then expresses to Ellen his own anxieties; that although he does not want a tawdry love affair, he cannot bear to remain apart from her. Ellen responds that it is impossible for them to deceive those who trust them. Archer abruptly stops the carriage and leaves before they reach Mrs. Mingott's. That evening at home, May reports to her husband that Mrs. Mingott's health has improved. Again, Archer feels stifled by the monotony of his domestic situation, by the utter predictability of his wife. He morbidly ponders that perhaps May will die young and set him free. A week later, he calls on Mrs. Mingott, hoping to see Ellen. Mrs. Mingott reveals that Ellen will stay with her to keep her company while she recovers from her stroke. Archer sees this as a sign that Ellen has realized that she cannot remain apart from Archer. Mrs. Mingott asks Archer to support her decision to have Ellen remain at her side and to significantly increase her allowance. Archer immediately agrees.

By Chapter 28, Beaufort's failure is complete, and high society is struggling to assess the situation and to regain its otherwise placid composure. From Old New York's point of view, there is nothing to do but to forget the Beauforts and move on. Wharton here captures the utter hypocrisy of New York society and demonstrates just how obsessed with appearances it really is. While people have always suspected that Beaufort had done some illegitimate business before he came to New York, they accepted him because he gave the appearance of propriety and because he threw lavish parties. When his failures became impossible for them to ignore, the only thing they could do to avoid any unpleasantness was to exclude Beaufort from good society. It was seen as a matter of principle for Mrs. Beaufort to dutifully remain at her husband's side. Her begging Mrs. Mingott not to exclude Beaufort and herself from society was thus interpreted as an unthinkable offense. In Chapter 28 we also get some insight into how much May really knows about Archer's interactions with Ellen. When Archer explains that his trial in Washington has been postponed, she counters that the rest of his office is still planning to go. Her insistence on understanding the specifics of the postponement indicates to Archer that she has some suspicions. Yet throughout their conversation May remains unnaturally bright and cheerful, as though she is afraid or incapable of voicing her real concerns. For once, Archer feels pity and not disdain for her weaknesses, and her obvious attempts to hide what she knows pains him greatly. As Wharton writes: "It did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him." In the carriage, Archer is elated to again be near Ellen. Yet the small amount of time they have alone forces them to confront the difficulties of their situation. Archer is filled with idealistic wishes. Ellen reminds him that if they did have a relationship, she would be seen by everyone as being little more than his mistress. Archer responds that he wants them to go to "a world where words like that ... don't exist." In this statement, Archer equates his individual freedom with an escape from New York. Yet his conception of a label- free world is far from practical. Ellen understands this and responds gently, "Oh, my dear, where is that country? Have you ever been there?" She explains that those who set off in search of a new world only find places that resemble the old conditions. Ellen realizes that a true escape from the judgments of others is impossible and that solutions cannot be found simply by running away.


Archer had been stunned by old Catherine's news.  It was only natural
that Madame Olenska should have hastened from Washington in response to
her grandmother's summons; but that she should have decided to remain
under her roof--especially now that Mrs. Mingott had almost regained
her health--was less easy to explain.

Archer was sure that Madame Olenska's decision had not been influenced
by the change in her financial situation.  He knew the exact figure of
the small income which her husband had allowed her at their separation.
Without the addition of her grandmother's allowance it was hardly
enough to live on, in any sense known to the Mingott vocabulary; and
now that Medora Manson, who shared her life, had been ruined, such a
pittance would barely keep the two women clothed and fed.  Yet Archer
was convinced that Madame Olenska had not accepted her grandmother's
offer from interested motives.

She had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance of
persons used to large fortunes, and indifferent to money; but she could
go without many things which her relations considered indispensable,
and Mrs. Lovell Mingott and Mrs. Welland had often been heard to
deplore that any one who had enjoyed the cosmopolitan luxuries of Count
Olenski's establishments should care so little about "how things were
done."  Moreover, as Archer knew, several months had passed since her
allowance had been cut off; yet in the interval she had made no effort
to regain her grandmother's favour.  Therefore if she had changed her
course it must be for a different reason.

He did not have far to seek for that reason.  On the way from the ferry
she had told him that he and she must remain apart; but she had said it
with her head on his breast.  He knew that there was no calculated
coquetry in her words; she was fighting her fate as he had fought his,
and clinging desperately to her resolve that they should not break
faith with the people who trusted them.  But during the ten days which
had elapsed since her return to New York she had perhaps guessed from
his silence, and from the fact of his making no attempt to see her,
that he was meditating a decisive step, a step from which there was no
turning back.  At the thought, a sudden fear of her own weakness might
have seized her, and she might have felt that, after all, it was better
to accept the compromise usual in such cases, and follow the line of
least resistance.

An hour earlier, when he had rung Mrs. Mingott's bell, Archer had
fancied that his path was clear before him.  He had meant to have a
word alone with Madame Olenska, and failing that, to learn from her
grandmother on what day, and by which train, she was returning to
Washington.  In that train he intended to join her, and travel with her
to Washington, or as much farther as she was willing to go.  His own
fancy inclined to Japan.  At any rate she would understand at once
that, wherever she went, he was going.  He meant to leave a note for
May that should cut off any other alternative.

He had fancied himself not only nerved for this plunge but eager to
take it; yet his first feeling on hearing that the course of events was
changed had been one of relief.  Now, however, as he walked home from
Mrs. Mingott's, he was conscious of a growing distaste for what lay
before him.  There was nothing unknown or unfamiliar in the path he was
presumably to tread; but when he had trodden it before it was as a free
man, who was accountable to no one for his actions, and could lend
himself with an amused detachment to the game of precautions and
prevarications, concealments and compliances, that the part required.
This procedure was called "protecting a woman's honour"; and the best
fiction, combined with the after-dinner talk of his elders, had long
since initiated him into every detail of its code.

Now he saw the matter in a new light, and his part in it seemed
singularly diminished.  It was, in fact, that which, with a secret
fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and
unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and
incessant lie.  A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and
every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every
word and in every silence.

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such
a part toward her husband.  A woman's standard of truthfulness was
tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in
the arts of the enslaved.  Then she could always plead moods and
nerves, and the right not to be held too strictly to account; and even
in the most strait-laced societies the laugh was always against the
husband.

But in Archer's little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a
certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their
philandering after marriage.  In the rotation of crops there was a
recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than
once.

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought Lefferts
despicable.  But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like
Lefferts: for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the
dread argument of the individual case.  Ellen Olenska was like no other
woman, he was like no other man: their situation, therefore, resembled
no one else's, and they were answerable to no tribunal but that of
their own judgment.

Yes, but in ten minutes more he would be mounting his own doorstep; and
there were May, and habit, and honour, and all the old decencies that
he and his people had always believed in ...

At his corner he hesitated, and then walked on down Fifth Avenue.

Ahead of him, in the winter night, loomed a big unlit house.  As he
drew near he thought how often he had seen it blazing with lights, its
steps awninged and carpeted, and carriages waiting in double line to
draw up at the curbstone.  It was in the conservatory that stretched
its dead-black bulk down the side street that he had taken his first
kiss from May; it was under the myriad candles of the ball-room that he
had seen her appear, tall and silver-shining as a young Diana.

Now the house was as dark as the grave, except for a faint flare of gas
in the basement, and a light in one upstairs room where the blind had
not been lowered.  As Archer reached the corner he saw that the
carriage standing at the door was Mrs. Manson Mingott's.  What an
opportunity for Sillerton Jackson, if he should chance to pass!  Archer
had been greatly moved by old Catherine's account of Madame Olenska's
attitude toward Mrs. Beaufort; it made the righteous reprobation of New
York seem like a passing by on the other side.  But he knew well enough
what construction the clubs and drawing-rooms would put on Ellen
Olenska's visits to her cousin.

He paused and looked up at the lighted window.  No doubt the two women
were sitting together in that room: Beaufort had probably sought
consolation elsewhere.  There were even rumours that he had left New
York with Fanny Ring; but Mrs. Beaufort's attitude made the report seem
improbable.

Archer had the nocturnal perspective of Fifth Avenue almost to himself.
At that hour most people were indoors, dressing for dinner; and he was
secretly glad that Ellen's exit was likely to be unobserved.  As the
thought passed through his mind the door opened, and she came out.
Behind her was a faint light, such as might have been carried down the
stairs to show her the way.  She turned to say a word to some one; then
the door closed, and she came down the steps.

"Ellen," he said in a low voice, as she reached the pavement.

She stopped with a slight start, and just then he saw two young men of
fashionable cut approaching.  There was a familiar air about their
overcoats and the way their smart silk mufflers were folded over their
white ties; and he wondered how youths of their quality happened to be
dining out so early.  Then he remembered that the Reggie Chiverses,
whose house was a few doors above, were taking a large party that
evening to see Adelaide Neilson in Romeo and Juliet, and guessed that
the two were of the number.  They passed under a lamp, and he
recognised Lawrence Lefferts and a young Chivers.

A mean desire not to have Madame Olenska seen at the Beauforts' door
vanished as he felt the penetrating warmth of her hand.

"I shall see you now--we shall be together," he broke out, hardly
knowing what he said.

"Ah," she answered, "Granny has told you?"

While he watched her he was aware that Lefferts and Chivers, on
reaching the farther side of the street corner, had discreetly struck
away across Fifth Avenue.  It was the kind of masculine solidarity that
he himself often practised; now he sickened at their connivance.  Did
she really imagine that he and she could live like this?  And if not,
what else did she imagine?

"Tomorrow I must see you--somewhere where we can be alone," he said, in
a voice that sounded almost angry to his own ears.

She wavered, and moved toward the carriage.

"But I shall be at Granny's--for the present that is," she added, as if
conscious that her change of plans required some explanation.

"Somewhere where we can be alone," he insisted.

She gave a faint laugh that grated on him.

"In New York?  But there are no churches ... no monuments."

"There's the Art Museum--in the Park," he explained, as she looked
puzzled.  "At half-past two.  I shall be at the door ..."

She turned away without answering and got quickly into the carriage.
As it drove off she leaned forward, and he thought she waved her hand
in the obscurity.  He stared after her in a turmoil of contradictory
feelings.  It seemed to him that he had been speaking not to the woman
he loved but to another, a woman he was indebted to for pleasures
already wearied of: it was hateful to find himself the prisoner of this
hackneyed vocabulary.

"She'll come!" he said to himself, almost contemptuously.

Avoiding the popular "Wolfe collection," whose anecdotic canvases
filled one of the main galleries of the queer wilderness of cast-iron
and encaustic tiles known as the Metropolitan Museum, they had wandered
down a passage to the room where the "Cesnola antiquities" mouldered in
unvisited loneliness.

They had this melancholy retreat to themselves, and seated on the divan
enclosing the central steam-radiator, they were staring silently at the
glass cabinets mounted in ebonised wood which contained the recovered
fragments of Ilium.

"It's odd," Madame Olenska said, "I never came here before."

"Ah, well--.  Some day, I suppose, it will be a great Museum."

"Yes," she assented absently.

She stood up and wandered across the room.  Archer, remaining seated,
watched the light movements of her figure, so girlish even under its
heavy furs, the cleverly planted heron wing in her fur cap, and the way
a dark curl lay like a flattened vine spiral on each cheek above the
ear.  His mind, as always when they first met, was wholly absorbed in
the delicious details that made her herself and no other.  Presently he
rose and approached the case before which she stood.  Its glass shelves
were crowded with small broken objects--hardly recognisable domestic
utensils, ornaments and personal trifles--made of glass, of clay, of
discoloured bronze and other time-blurred substances.

"It seems cruel," she said, "that after a while nothing matters ... any
more than these little things, that used to be necessary and important
to forgotten people, and now have to be guessed at under a magnifying
glass and labelled:  'Use unknown.'"

"Yes; but meanwhile--"

"Ah, meanwhile--"

As she stood there, in her long sealskin coat, her hands thrust in a
small round muff, her veil drawn down like a transparent mask to the
tip of her nose, and the bunch of violets he had brought her stirring
with her quickly-taken breath, it seemed incredible that this pure
harmony of line and colour should ever suffer the stupid law of change.

"Meanwhile everything matters--that concerns you," he said.

She looked at him thoughtfully, and turned back to the divan.  He sat
down beside her and waited; but suddenly he heard a step echoing far
off down the empty rooms, and felt the pressure of the minutes.

"What is it you wanted to tell me?" she asked, as if she had received
the same warning.

"What I wanted to tell you?" he rejoined.  "Why, that I believe you
came to New York because you were afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Of my coming to Washington."

She looked down at her muff, and he saw her hands stir in it uneasily.

"Well--?"

"Well--yes," she said.

"You WERE afraid?  You knew--?"

"Yes: I knew ..."

"Well, then?" he insisted.

"Well, then: this is better, isn't it?" she returned with a long
questioning sigh.

"Better--?"

"We shall hurt others less.  Isn't it, after all, what you always
wanted?"

"To have you here, you mean--in reach and yet out of reach?  To meet
you in this way, on the sly?  It's the very reverse of what I want.  I
told you the other day what I wanted."

She hesitated.  "And you still think this--worse?"

"A thousand times!"  He paused.  "It would be easy to lie to you; but
the truth is I think it detestable."

"Oh, so do I!" she cried with a deep breath of relief.

He sprang up impatiently.  "Well, then--it's my turn to ask: what is
it, in God's name, that you think better?"

She hung her head and continued to clasp and unclasp her hands in her
muff.  The step drew nearer, and a guardian in a braided cap walked
listlessly through the room like a ghost stalking through a necropolis.
They fixed their eyes simultaneously on the case opposite them, and
when the official figure had vanished down a vista of mummies and
sarcophagi Archer spoke again.

"What do you think better?"

Instead of answering she murmured:  "I promised Granny to stay with her
because it seemed to me that here I should be safer."

"From me?"

She bent her head slightly, without looking at him.

"Safer from loving me?"

Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and
hang in a mesh of her veil.

"Safer from doing irreparable harm.  Don't let us be like all the
others!" she protested.

"What others?  I don't profess to be different from my kind.  I'm
consumed by the same wants and the same longings."

She glanced at him with a kind of terror, and he saw a faint colour
steal into her cheeks.

"Shall I--once come to you; and then go home?" she suddenly hazarded in
a low clear voice.

The blood rushed to the young man's forehead.  "Dearest!" he said,
without moving.  It seemed as if he held his heart in his hands, like a
full cup that the least motion might overbrim.

Then her last phrase struck his ear and his face clouded.  "Go home?
What do you mean by going home?"

"Home to my husband."

"And you expect me to say yes to that?"

She raised her troubled eyes to his.  "What else is there?  I can't
stay here and lie to the people who've been good to me."

"But that's the very reason why I ask you to come away!"

"And destroy their lives, when they've helped me to remake mine?"

Archer sprang to his feet and stood looking down on her in inarticulate
despair.  It would have been easy to say:  "Yes, come; come once."  He
knew the power she would put in his hands if she consented; there would
be no difficulty then in persuading her not to go back to her husband.

But something silenced the word on his lips.  A sort of passionate
honesty in her made it inconceivable that he should try to draw her
into that familiar trap.  "If I were to let her come," he said to
himself, "I should have to let her go again."  And that was not to be
imagined.

But he saw the shadow of the lashes on her wet cheek, and wavered.

"After all," he began again, "we have lives of our own....  There's no
use attempting the impossible.  You're so unprejudiced about some
things, so used, as you say, to looking at the Gorgon, that I don't
know why you're afraid to face our case, and see it as it really
is--unless you think the sacrifice is not worth making."

She stood up also, her lips tightening under a rapid frown.

"Call it that, then--I must go," she said, drawing her little watch
from her bosom.

She turned away, and he followed and caught her by the wrist.  "Well,
then: come to me once," he said, his head turning suddenly at the
thought of losing her; and for a second or two they looked at each
other almost like enemies.

"When?" he insisted.  "Tomorrow?"

She hesitated.  "The day after."

"Dearest--!" he said again.

She had disengaged her wrist; but for a moment they continued to hold
each other's eyes, and he saw that her face, which had grown very pale,
was flooded with a deep inner radiance.  His heart beat with awe: he
felt that he had never before beheld love visible.

"Oh, I shall be late--good-bye.  No, don't come any farther than this,"
she cried, walking hurriedly away down the long room, as if the
reflected radiance in his eyes had frightened her.  When she reached
the door she turned for a moment to wave a quick farewell.

Archer walked home alone.  Darkness was falling when he let himself
into his house, and he looked about at the familiar objects in the hall
as if he viewed them from the other side of the grave.

The parlour-maid, hearing his step, ran up the stairs to light the gas
on the upper landing.

"Is Mrs. Archer in?"

"No, sir; Mrs. Archer went out in the carriage after luncheon, and
hasn't come back."

With a sense of relief he entered the library and flung himself down in
his armchair.  The parlour-maid followed, bringing the student lamp and
shaking some coals onto the dying fire.  When she left he continued to
sit motionless, his elbows on his knees, his chin on his clasped hands,
his eyes fixed on the red grate.

He sat there without conscious thoughts, without sense of the lapse of
time, in a deep and grave amazement that seemed to suspend life rather
than quicken it.  "This was what had to be, then ... this was what had
to be," he kept repeating to himself, as if he hung in the clutch of
doom.  What he had dreamed of had been so different that there was a
mortal chill in his rapture.

The door opened and May came in.

"I'm dreadfully late--you weren't worried, were you?" she asked, laying
her hand on his shoulder with one of her rare caresses.

He looked up astonished.  "Is it late?"

"After seven.  I believe you've been asleep!"  She laughed, and drawing
out her hat pins tossed her velvet hat on the sofa.  She looked paler
than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation.

"I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away Ellen came in from
a walk; so I stayed and had a long talk with her.  It was ages since
we'd had a real talk...." She had dropped into her usual armchair,
facing his, and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair.  He
fancied she expected him to speak.

"A really good talk," she went on, smiling with what seemed to Archer
an unnatural vividness.  "She was so dear--just like the old Ellen.
I'm afraid I haven't been fair to her lately.  I've sometimes thought--"

Archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, out of the radius
of the lamp.

"Yes, you've thought--?" he echoed as she paused.

"Well, perhaps I haven't judged her fairly.  She's so different--at
least on the surface.  She takes up such odd people--she seems to like
to make herself conspicuous.  I suppose it's the life she's led in that
fast European society; no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her.  But I
don't want to judge her unfairly."

She paused again, a little breathless with the unwonted length of her
speech, and sat with her lips slightly parted and a deep blush on her
cheeks.

Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had
suffused her face in the Mission Garden at St. Augustine.  He became
aware of the same obscure effort in her, the same reaching out toward
something beyond the usual range of her vision.

"She hates Ellen," he thought, "and she's trying to overcome the
feeling, and to get me to help her to overcome it."

The thought moved him, and for a moment he was on the point of breaking
the silence between them, and throwing himself on her mercy.

"You understand, don't you," she went on, "why the family have
sometimes been annoyed?  We all did what we could for her at first; but
she never seemed to understand.  And now this idea of going to see Mrs.
Beaufort, of going there in Granny's carriage!  I'm afraid she's quite
alienated the van der Luydens ..."

"Ah," said Archer with an impatient laugh.  The open door had closed
between them again.

"It's time to dress; we're dining out, aren't we?" he asked, moving
from the fire.

She rose also, but lingered near the hearth.  As he walked past her she
moved forward impulsively, as though to detain him: their eyes met, and
he saw that hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had left her
to drive to Jersey City.

She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his.

"You haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her
tremble in his arms.

"At the court of the Tuileries," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his
reminiscent smile, "such things were pretty openly tolerated."

The scene was the van der Luydens' black walnut dining-room in Madison
Avenue, and the time the evening after Newland Archer's visit to the
Museum of Art.  Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few
days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the
announcement of Beaufort's failure.  It had been represented to them
that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable
affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever.  It was
one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they "owed it to
society" to show themselves at the Opera, and even to open their own
doors.

"It will never do, my dear Louisa, to let people like Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers think they can step into Regina's shoes.  It is just at such
times that new people push in and get a footing.  It was owing to the
epidemic of chicken-pox in New York the winter Mrs. Struthers first
appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their
wives were in the nursery.  You and dear Henry, Louisa, must stand in
the breach as you always have."

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden could not remain deaf to such a call, and
reluctantly but heroically they had come to town, unmuffled the house,
and sent out invitations for two dinners and an evening reception.

On this particular evening they had invited Sillerton Jackson, Mrs.
Archer and Newland and his wife to go with them to the Opera, where
Faust was being sung for the first time that winter.  Nothing was done
without ceremony under the van der Luyden roof, and though there were
but four guests the repast had begun at seven punctually, so that the
proper sequence of courses might be served without haste before the
gentlemen settled down to their cigars.

Archer had not seen his wife since the evening before.  He had left
early for the office, where he had plunged into an accumulation of
unimportant business.  In the afternoon one of the senior partners had
made an unexpected call on his time; and he had reached home so late
that May had preceded him to the van der Luydens', and sent back the
carriage.

Now, across the Skuytercliff carnations and the massive plate, she
struck him as pale and languid; but her eyes shone, and she talked with
exaggerated animation.

The subject which had called forth Mr. Sillerton Jackson's favourite
allusion had been brought up (Archer fancied not without intention) by
their hostess.  The Beaufort failure, or rather the Beaufort attitude
since the failure, was still a fruitful theme for the drawing-room
moralist; and after it had been thoroughly examined and condemned Mrs.
van der Luyden had turned her scrupulous eyes on May Archer.

"Is it possible, dear, that what I hear is true?  I was told your
grandmother Mingott's carriage was seen standing at Mrs. Beaufort's
door."  It was noticeable that she no longer called the offending lady
by her Christian name.

May's colour rose, and Mrs. Archer put in hastily: "If it was, I'm
convinced it was there without Mrs. Mingott's knowledge."

"Ah, you think--?"  Mrs. van der Luyden paused, sighed, and glanced at
her husband.

"I'm afraid," Mr. van der Luyden said, "that Madame Olenska's kind
heart may have led her into the imprudence of calling on Mrs. Beaufort."

"Or her taste for peculiar people," put in Mrs. Archer in a dry tone,
while her eyes dwelt innocently on her son's.

"I'm sorry to think it of Madame Olenska," said Mrs. van der Luyden;
and Mrs. Archer murmured: "Ah, my dear--and after you'd had her twice
at Skuytercliff!"

It was at this point that Mr. Jackson seized the chance to place his
favourite allusion.

"At the Tuileries," he repeated, seeing the eyes of the company
expectantly turned on him, "the standard was excessively lax in some
respects; and if you'd asked where Morny's money came from--!  Or who
paid the debts of some of the Court beauties ..."

"I hope, dear Sillerton," said Mrs. Archer, "you are not suggesting
that we should adopt such standards?"

"I never suggest," returned Mr. Jackson imperturbably.  "But Madame
Olenska's foreign bringing-up may make her less particular--"

"Ah," the two elder ladies sighed.

"Still, to have kept her grandmother's carriage at a defaulter's door!"
Mr. van der Luyden protested; and Archer guessed that he was
remembering, and resenting, the hampers of carnations he had sent to
the little house in Twenty-third Street.

"Of course I've always said that she looks at things quite
differently," Mrs. Archer summed up.

A flush rose to May's forehead.  She looked across the table at her
husband, and said precipitately:  "I'm sure Ellen meant it kindly."

"Imprudent people are often kind," said Mrs. Archer, as if the fact
were scarcely an extenuation; and Mrs. van der Luyden murmured:  "If
only she had consulted some one--"

"Ah, that she never did!" Mrs. Archer rejoined.

At this point Mr. van der Luyden glanced at his wife, who bent her head
slightly in the direction of Mrs. Archer; and the glimmering trains of
the three ladies swept out of the door while the gentlemen settled down
to their cigars.  Mr. van der Luyden supplied short ones on Opera
nights; but they were so good that they made his guests deplore his
inexorable punctuality.

Archer, after the first act, had detached himself from the party and
made his way to the back of the club box.  From there he watched, over
various Chivers, Mingott and Rushworth shoulders, the same scene that
he had looked at, two years previously, on the night of his first
meeting with Ellen Olenska.  He had half-expected her to appear again
in old Mrs. Mingott's box, but it remained empty; and he sat
motionless, his eyes fastened on it, till suddenly Madame Nilsson's
pure soprano broke out into "M'ama, non m'ama ..."

Archer turned to the stage, where, in the familiar setting of giant
roses and pen-wiper pansies, the same large blonde victim was
succumbing to the same small brown seducer.

From the stage his eyes wandered to the point of the horseshoe where
May sat between two older ladies, just as, on that former evening, she
had sat between Mrs. Lovell Mingott and her newly-arrived "foreign"
cousin.  As on that evening, she was all in white; and Archer, who had
not noticed what she wore, recognised the blue-white satin and old lace
of her wedding dress.

It was the custom, in old New York, for brides to appear in this costly
garment during the first year or two of marriage: his mother, he knew,
kept hers in tissue paper in the hope that Janey might some day wear
it, though poor Janey was reaching the age when pearl grey poplin and
no bridesmaids would be thought more "appropriate."

It struck Archer that May, since their return from Europe, had seldom
worn her bridal satin, and the surprise of seeing her in it made him
compare her appearance with that of the young girl he had watched with
such blissful anticipations two years earlier.

Though May's outline was slightly heavier, as her goddesslike build had
foretold, her athletic erectness of carriage, and the girlish
transparency of her expression, remained unchanged: but for the slight
languor that Archer had lately noticed in her she would have been the
exact image of the girl playing with the bouquet of
lilies-of-the-valley on her betrothal evening.  The fact seemed an
additional appeal to his pity: such innocence was as moving as the
trustful clasp of a child.  Then he remembered the passionate
generosity latent under that incurious calm.  He recalled her glance of
understanding when he had urged that their engagement should be
announced at the Beaufort ball; he heard the voice in which she had
said, in the Mission garden:  "I couldn't have my happiness made out of
a wrong--a wrong to some one else;" and an uncontrollable longing
seized him to tell her the truth, to throw himself on her generosity,
and ask for the freedom he had once refused.

Newland Archer was a quiet and self-controlled young man.  Conformity
to the discipline of a small society had become almost his second
nature.  It was deeply distasteful to him to do anything melodramatic
and conspicuous, anything Mr. van der Luyden would have deprecated and
the club box condemned as bad form.  But he had become suddenly
unconscious of the club box, of Mr. van der Luyden, of all that had so
long enclosed him in the warm shelter of habit.  He walked along the
semi-circular passage at the back of the house, and opened the door of
Mrs. van der Luyden's box as if it had been a gate into the unknown.

"M'ama!" thrilled out the triumphant Marguerite; and the occupants of
the box looked up in surprise at Archer's entrance.  He had already
broken one of the rules of his world, which forbade the entering of a
box during a solo.

Slipping between Mr. van der Luyden and Sillerton Jackson, he leaned
over his wife.

"I've got a beastly headache; don't tell any one, but come home, won't
you?" he whispered.

May gave him a glance of comprehension, and he saw her whisper to his
mother, who nodded sympathetically; then she murmured an excuse to Mrs.
van der Luyden, and rose from her seat just as Marguerite fell into
Faust's arms.  Archer, while he helped her on with her Opera cloak,
noticed the exchange of a significant smile between the older ladies.

As they drove away May laid her hand shyly on his.  "I'm so sorry you
don't feel well.  I'm afraid they've been overworking you again at the
office."

"No--it's not that: do you mind if I open the window?" he returned
confusedly, letting down the pane on his side.  He sat staring out into
the street, feeling his wife beside him as a silent watchful
interrogation, and keeping his eyes steadily fixed on the passing
houses.  At their door she caught her skirt in the step of the
carriage, and fell against him.

"Did you hurt yourself?" he asked, steadying her with his arm.

"No; but my poor dress--see how I've torn it!" she exclaimed.  She bent
to gather up a mud-stained breadth, and followed him up the steps into
the hall.  The servants had not expected them so early, and there was
only a glimmer of gas on the upper landing.

Archer mounted the stairs, turned up the light, and put a match to the
brackets on each side of the library mantelpiece.  The curtains were
drawn, and the warm friendly aspect of the room smote him like that of
a familiar face met during an unavowable errand.

He noticed that his wife was very pale, and asked if he should get her
some brandy.

"Oh, no," she exclaimed with a momentary flush, as she took off her
cloak.  "But hadn't you better go to bed at once?" she added, as he
opened a silver box on the table and took out a cigarette.

Archer threw down the cigarette and walked to his usual place by the
fire.

"No; my head is not as bad as that."  He paused.  "And there's
something I want to say; something important--that I must tell you at
once."

She had dropped into an armchair, and raised her head as he spoke.
"Yes, dear?" she rejoined, so gently that he wondered at the lack of
wonder with which she received this preamble.

"May--" he began, standing a few feet from her chair, and looking over
at her as if the slight distance between them were an unbridgeable
abyss.  The sound of his voice echoed uncannily through the homelike
hush, and he repeated:  "There is something I've got to tell you ...
about myself ..."

She sat silent, without a movement or a tremor of her lashes.  She was
still extremely pale, but her face had a curious tranquillity of
expression that seemed drawn from some secret inner source.

Archer checked the conventional phrases of self-accusal that were
crowding to his lips.  He was determined to put the case baldly,
without vain recrimination or excuse.

"Madame Olenska--" he said; but at the name his wife raised her hand as
if to silence him.  As she did so the gaslight struck on the gold of
her wedding-ring.

"Oh, why should we talk about Ellen tonight?" she asked, with a slight
pout of impatience.

"Because I ought to have spoken before."

Her face remained calm.  "Is it really worth while, dear?  I know I've
been unfair to her at times--perhaps we all have.  You've understood
her, no doubt, better than we did: you've always been kind to her.  But
what does it matter, now it's all over?"

Archer looked at her blankly.  Could it be possible that the sense of
unreality in which he felt himself imprisoned had communicated itself
to his wife?

"All over--what do you mean?" he asked in an indistinct stammer.

May still looked at him with transparent eyes.  "Why--since she's going
back to Europe so soon; since Granny approves and understands, and has
arranged to make her independent of her husband--"

She broke off, and Archer, grasping the corner of the mantelpiece in
one convulsed hand, and steadying himself against it, made a vain
effort to extend the same control to his reeling thoughts.

"I supposed," he heard his wife's even voice go on, "that you had been
kept at the office this evening about the business arrangements.  It
was settled this morning, I believe."  She lowered her eyes under his
unseeing stare, and another fugitive flush passed over her face.

He understood that his own eyes must be unbearable, and turning away,
rested his elbows on the mantel-shelf and covered his face.  Something
drummed and clanged furiously in his ears; he could not tell if it were
the blood in his veins, or the tick of the clock on the mantel.

May sat without moving or speaking while the clock slowly measured out
five minutes.  A lump of coal fell forward in the grate, and hearing
her rise to push it back, Archer at length turned and faced her.

"It's impossible," he exclaimed.

"Impossible--?"

"How do you know--what you've just told me?"

"I saw Ellen yesterday--I told you I'd seen her at Granny's."

"It wasn't then that she told you?"

"No; I had a note from her this afternoon.--Do you want to see it?"

He could not find his voice, and she went out of the room, and came
back almost immediately.

"I thought you knew," she said simply.

She laid a sheet of paper on the table, and Archer put out his hand and
took it up.  The letter contained only a few lines.

"May dear, I have at last made Granny understand that my visit to her
could be no more than a visit; and she has been as kind and generous as
ever.  She sees now that if I return to Europe I must live by myself,
or rather with poor Aunt Medora, who is coming with me. I am hurrying
back to Washington to pack up, and we sail next week.  You must be very
good to Granny when I'm gone--as good as you've always been to me.
Ellen.

"If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind, please tell
them it would be utterly useless."

Archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down
and burst out laughing.

The sound of his laugh startled him.  It recalled Janey's midnight
fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over
May's telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been
advanced.

"Why did she write this?" he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme
effort.

May met the question with her unshaken candour.  "I suppose because we
talked things over yesterday--"

"What things?"

"I told her I was afraid I hadn't been fair to her--hadn't always
understood how hard it must have been for her here, alone among so many
people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to
criticise, and yet didn't always know the circumstances." She paused.
"I knew you'd been the one friend she could always count on; and I
wanted her to know that you and I were the same--in all our feelings."

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly:
"She understood my wishing to tell her this.  I think she understands
everything."

She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold hands pressed it
quickly against her cheek.

"My head aches too; good-night, dear," she said, and turned to the
door, her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the
room.

Archer is stunned upon leaving Mrs. Mingott's. He reasons that Ellen's decision to stay in New York must be an indication that she has resolved to have an affair with him. While Archer is somewhat relieved that she will be staying, he is also afraid that their affair will be no different than those of his peers and that it will dissolve into a pathetic pack of lies. Yet he consoles himself with the thought that he and Ellen are different from the rest of New York society and that their unique situation puts them above the judgment of their clan. That evening, he waits in front of Beaufort's house for Ellen, who we learn has come to console Regina Beaufort in the midst of her troubles. They agree to meet the next day at the Metropolitan Museum. The following day, Archer meets Ellen in the antiquities gallery of the museum. Ellen explains that she has decided to stay near her grandmother because she feels she will be safe there from the temptation of Archer. She begs him not to let them become like the other adulterers they know. Yet she hesitates and asks him if she should just come to him once and then leave New York. Archer agrees, and they plan to meet two days later. Back home that evening, Archer learns from May that she too has seen Ellen that afternoon. May claims that the two of them have had a long talk and that May has decided to befriend Ellen despite her eccentricities. The next night, the van der Luydens host a pre-opera dinner at their exclusive Madison Avenue home. At dinner, the topic of discussion is again the Beauforts' financial failure. The van der Luydens are dismayed to learn that Ellen had been to see Mrs. Beaufort, an action they conceive of as imprudent, considering the Beauforts' fall from good society. At the opera, Archer feels guilty about his intended tryst with Ellen. At his side, May is wearing her wedding dress, as is the custom for young married women. Archer suddenly feels the urge to confess to her, and he persuades May to leave the opera early. Back home, Archer is on the verge of confessing when May interrupts him by mentioning that Ellen has decided to return to Europe. Archer is stunned and excuses himself for bed.

After learning from Mrs. Mingott that Ellen will be remaining in New York, Archer's joy is tempered with a growing sense of anxiety. He is not so much worried about the actual moral questions raised in having an affair, but more about the bad appearance it would make. In explaining the codes of adultery, Wharton gives us a sense of how truly complex, and even contradictory, gender relations are in New York. While Archer argued in Book One that women face more restraints and judgment than men if they have love affairs, he now seems to reverse this opinion. A woman, he muses, is considered weak and subject to fits of nerves. Therefore, any marital infidelity on her part only makes her husband look foolish for being cuckolded. But a married man who initiates an affair is viewed with contempt, for he is expected to be responsible to his duty. In such cases, the man's wife is pitied and supported. This commentary foreshadows the scene in Chapter 33, when the Archers throw a dinner party. The guests, assuming May to have been wronged by Archer's supposed infidelity, tacitly support her. Archer's meeting with Ellen in the antiquities wing of the Museum gives Wharton a chance to again compare Old New York to dead, ancient cultures. Ellen remarks that it is sad to see that all these artifacts from old cultures now have no use or meaning. Things that were once so important to a group of people now have no relevance in 1870. When Wharton wrote The Age of Innocence following the First World War, Old New York was itself a defunct society. Being an historical curiosity rather than a current reality, its individual artifacts and customs now seemed as obsolete as those represented in the glass cases of the Metropolitan Museum. In the Museum, Archer and Ellen find themselves torn on both an emotional and physical level. While Archer until this point has restrained his erotic feelings, he is now impatient to arrange a more intimate rendezvous with Ellen. Both are still afraid that if their relationship is consummated, there will be nothing that sets them above the infidelities of Beaufort and Larry Lefferts. However, Ellen does suggest that they meet once and that afterwards she will leave him for good. Archer is daunted by the idea of parting permanently, but he recklessly agrees to meet her anyway. It is significant that after they agree to meet, Archer and Ellen stand facing each other "almost like enemies. " Both realize that their relationship is disturbingly close to becoming a typical affair. The thought that they will not be able to escape the trappings of an affair  is enough to make them feel antagonistic towards each other. In the following scene, the setting shifts to the opera. By returning, near the end of the novel, to the setting that opened the novel, Wharton allows us to compare the two and reflect upon what has changed since that time. On the surface, very little has changed. The same families sit in the same boxes, and they still gossip more than they attend the stage. Ellen Olenska is still a topic of discussion, and her recent decision to call on Mrs. Beaufort is greeted with just as much shock as her low-cut dress was a year before. But now instead of leaving the opera excited to announce his recent engagement, Archer feels trapped by guilt. Having decided to tell May the truth about his feelings for Ellen and to ask for his freedom from their marriage, he persuades May leave the opera early. As they return home, Wharton includes a small but foreboding symbol. May, who has worn her wedding dress to the Opera now trips and tears its hem. The torn and muddied wedding dress suggests that their marriage is threatened by Archer's feelings for Ellen and that his decision to meet with her sullies the wedding vows he made to May.