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."

The play opens at the opera. Newland Archer enters his opera box and looks out across the theater to see his girlfriend, May Welland, touch the lilies he had given her. While dreaming of their future together, his thoughts are interrupted by gasps from the gentlemen sitting with him. They are whispering about a fashionably dressed woman who has just sat down in the box with May. Sillerton Jackson gasps, "I did not think they would have tried it on," which means, he can1t believe the Mingotts would allow the woman to come and sit in their box at the Opera.

This is a book about the conventions of "Old New York", New York City in the 18701s. Wharton loves contrasting the old against the new. She begins these contrasts in the very first paragraph. Here she describes the new Opera theater that is going to be erected in the "remote" forties. We can assume that the forties have been built up since then and people reading her book in the 19201s  would enjoy hearing about how New York has changed. Along these lines, there is also a description of the old people versus the "new people, whom NY was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to. Also important in this first chapter is Wharton1s discussion of fashionability and propriety. We can tell from the way that Newland Archer, Lawrence Lefferts and Mr. Silverton Jackson are introduced that Wharton will spend a lot of time in the novel discussing and perhaps critiquing these concepts in the book. Of note, as well, is the great attention to detail that Wharton has. The way she describes clothing and interior decoration with much detail has led many to dub this book a "costume novel". We will have to see for ourselves if the book develops beyond being a "bodice ripper" sort of book. May Welland will be one of the most important characters in the book. She is holding Lillies of the Valley. In the 18701s the lily of the valley was the flower of chastity and of the names Cynthia and Diana. Later in the book, May is often compared to Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt

The novel opens on a January evening in the early 1870s. All of New York society has gathered at the Academy of Music to hear Christine Nilsson sing in the opera Faust. Everyone who is anyone is there. Newland Archer arrives fashionably late and enters the club box in the middle of the garden scene. It's his fave. From where he stands, he can see old Mrs. Manson Mingott's box. Sitting there is Mrs. Lovell Mingott, Mrs. Welland, and a girl with a bouquet of lilies of the valley. Archer contemplates the girl with satisfaction; she is May Welland, and they have recently gotten engaged. She's a catch, for sure. In the club box, Lawrence Lefferts and Mr. Sillerton Jackson are astonished to see a woman enter Mrs. Mansott Mingott's box. Pass the opera glasses, please.


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.

Newland becomes annoyed as he realizes that everyone is paying attention to the box where his fiance is sitting. He doesn1t want the woman to whom he is engaged to be associated with a woman of questionable reputation. The strange woman is Ellen Olenska, a cousin of May. She has a bad reputation because she left her husband and ran off with his secretary. In New York Society, such behavior was not accepted. Newland suddenly wishes to sit next to his girlfriend, as if to protect her from the gossip. He also has a sudden urge to announce their engagement because he wants to distract attention from the foreign woman and place attention on the happy occasion of their engagement. He walks over to their box and is introduced to Ellen. Ellen explains that she remembers being kissed by him when they were little children and that returning to New York reminds her of her childhood. She can "see" everyone in their childhood underpants. Newland does not like her referring to New York society as being "a dear old place. He considers his society to be a grand institution and Ellen seems to be slighting this society.

Here we see how Newland is fixated with Taste. He is annoyed that his fiance may be associated with a woman of ill-repute; he thinks that Ellen1s dress is too revealing and that the Mingotts should have not brought her to the Opera. Also interesting in this chapter is the motif of the military: "Form was the mere visible representative and vicegerent of Taste. Thorley "entered the lists" as the ladies champion. Against whom are these members of New York Society mobilizing against. It is also interesting to examine which words are capitalized. Society, Family, Taste are capitalized words because they seem to Newland to be inflexible institutions that are very important. The remark that "the persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications and pale delicacies" is important as well. Will Newland be satisfied with this world. There is also a bit of foreshadowing in that Newland had kissed Ellen when she was little and that Ellen remembered the event. Is there some possibility of romance here. Food is an important motif in this book. Mrs. Manson Mingott and Mrs. Archer are looked down upon because they do not serve good food. Contrast is another important literary tool here. The old brownstone architecture is contrasted against the new cream-colored stones of the new inductees of the society. Ellen Olenska1s dark hair and red clothing are often contrasted against May1s blonde hair and white dress

We discover that the young woman who caused such a stir with Lefferts and Jackson is the Countess Olenska, who has arrived from Europe two days before. Countess Olenska is Mrs. Manson Mingott's granddaughter. Btw, Mrs. Manson Mingott herself has had a colorful history. Born Catherine Spicer, she was left a widow by her wealthy husband at the age of 28. She then proceeded to live the next fifty years in high style, consorting with all kinds of people abroad, including dukes, ambassadors, papists , and dancers. Lefferts and another man in the box, Thorley, gossip about Countess Olenska's past. She was married to a wealthy Polish nobleman, who turned out to be a horrible womanizer and serial cheater. Rumor has it that Countess Olenska left him, shacked up with his secretary, and finally ended up at her grandmother's in New York City. Scan-da-lous. All of this gossip annoys Archer because it is about a relative of his lady-love, May. He worries about the possible damage to her family's reputation. No one wants to be associated with a scandalous woman. At the end of the act, Archer visits the Mingotts's box. Mrs. Welland introduces Archer to Countess Olenska. Archer asks May whether he can tell her cousin about their engagement, and whether he can announce their engagement at the ball later that evening. May consents. Countess Olenska reminds Archer that they used to play together as children, and that Archer once kissed her. Archer finds her attitude toward New York society "disrespectful."


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."

After the Opera, everyone goes to the Beauforts1 home for the annual ball. He keeps a huge room in his house dedicated solely to the annual ball. It sits vacant 364 days in the year. There, May announces to friends that she is engaged. Newland and May dance and, as is appropriate, sit alone in the conservatory where they sneak a kiss while no one is looking. Newland asks if Ellen has come to the ball; he hopes that she has not come because of her ill reputation. May replies that Ellen did not feel her dress was pretty enough to attend the ball, so she went home. Newland is glad that May understands propriety so well that she know when not to discuss the "real" reason why Ellen decided not to come: her bad reputation.

In this chapter, it is important to see how reputation is discussed in such depth. The Beaufort1s reputation is discussed; the grandness of their ballroom is discussed. Also, of note, Newland fibs for the first time to May in this chapter; and, his fib concerns Ellen. Clothing is an important motif in this books. Beaufort1s servants have silk stockings; Ellen1s clothes are the excuse for why she does not attend the ball. Clothes serve a deep purpose in this novel; it is important to watch each detail of clothing so that we can understand at the end why such emphasis is placed on wardrobe. Another interesting motif is the idea of immortality in the members of New York Society. Mrs. Beaufort, here, is presented as sort of immortal. She "grows younger and blonder and more beautiful each year. As we continue reading we will find more examples of how people in this society seem to never age, defying death

Mrs. Beaufort arrives at the Opera during the Jewel Song, and then leaves after the third act for the ball she holds annually at the Beauforts's grand home. She always does this. After the opera, Archer walks up Fifth Avenue to the Beauforts's home for the ball. He sees Mrs. Welland and May at the ballroom door. May is obviously telling everybody about their engagement. After everybody congratulates Archer, he dances a waltz with May. Then they head to the conservatory for a smooch and a private chat. Archer admits that he didn't tell the Countess about their engagement, and May reminds him to do so.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As is customary for newly engaged people, Newland calls on Mrs. Welland and May and together they go to Mrs. Manson Mingott1s home to ask her blessing for the marriage. Her home "lacks propriety" because her drawing room is on the same floor as the bedroom. To Newland1s and May1s relief, Ellen is not home; she has gone out shopping during the main "shopping hour" which lacks propriety as well. Mingott of course gives her blessing and encourages Newland and May to marry soon, "before the bubble1s off the wine. As May, Newland and Mrs. Welland are leaving, Ellen returns with Beaufort. Newland apologizes to Ellen for not having told her of the engagement at the Opera. Ellen understands that it isn1t proper to reveal such things in crowds. Ellen asks Archer to come and visit some time, but Newland thinks to himself how inappropriate such a visit would be.

This chapter is a long discourse on propriety. There is a little bit of foreshadowing in that Mingott encourages the two to marry soon  perhaps there is trouble beneath the surface that Mingott recognizes. Also, we see the motif of immortality shine through in the character of Mrs. Catherine Manson Mingott. Catherine is the grand matriarch of New York Society. She is also similar to Mrs. Beaufort in that she never ages. Her face and body are so fat that she seems to have never wrinkled, despite her old age. Her never wrinkling makes it seem that she retains her youth

The next day, Archer and May commence their "betrothal visits" and visit all the members of their family to receive congratulations. They are accompanied by Mrs. Welland. The first visit up is to Mrs. Manson Mingott. May shows off her sapphire engagement ring. During their visit, Countess Olenska enters, followed by Julius Beaufort. With their arrival, Archer and the Wellands get up to leave, and Countess Olenska walks with them to the door. Archer apologizes for neglecting to tell Countess Olenska about their engagement, and she's totally okay with it. On the ride home, they talk about everything but Countess Olenska, which means, of course, that they are all thinking about Countess Olenska. Everyone is a bit scandalized that Countess Olenska is traipsing around town with the married Julius Beaufort.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her brother laughed.  "Why Elaine?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sillerton Jackson comes to dine with the Archers. Janey and Mrs. Archer want to hear the recent gossip on Ellen Olesnka. They began conversation discussing Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, who apparently was just a model for Mr. Struthers before they married. Then Ellen was discussed. Jackson said that she had not attended the ball and Mrs. Archer was glad of it. Janey ridicules Ellen1s dress; Mrs. Archer says that Ellen was bound to grow up strangely since she was permitted to wear black satin at her coming out ball. Newland defends Ellen and says that she should be able to act however she pleases since it isn1t her fault that she happened to have married a brute. Later, while the ladies retreat to work on a tapestry for May, the men smoke in the Gothic library. Newland remarks that "Women ought to be free.

This chapter is significant because Newland1s opinion of Ellen has changed; he now defends her and her actions; although he still believes in decorum he has taken a stance in his family that Ellen should not be blamed. What has caused this change of mind. Also, there is some indication of Newland1s "past". What happened between him and the Rushworth woman. Does he feel, in some ways, similar to Ellen. Later in the book, Janey is referred to as Cassandra-like. Cassandra is, in Greek mythology, an unfortunate gossip who tells the future although no one believes her. We see Janey1s role as the gossip first manifests here. Freedom is an important theme in this novel. Newland says that women should be free. But one of the central issues in the book is whether or not Newland, himself, is free. If he is not free, then how can he grant freedom. Is Ellen free. What about May. It is she whom Newland wishes to free the most, and yet, she may turn out to have more freedom than any other character in the novel. In which case, it is deeply ironic that Newland could wish for her freedom in the first place

The next evening, Mr. Sillerton Jackson arrives for dinner at the Archers's. At the dinner are Mr. Sillerton Jackson, Mrs. Archer, Janey Archer, and Newland Archer. Mrs. Archer first asks Mr. Sillerton Jackson about Mrs. Struthers's background, but this is only as a way into what she really wants to know: the dirt on Ellen Olenska. Mrs. Archer is shocked to learn from Mr. Sillerton Jackson that Ellen was seen walking around with Mr. Beaufort. The dinner guests debate whether Ellen is really as scandalous as all that. Mrs. Archer thinks she totally is. Mr. Sillerton Jackson serves up some juicy bits from Ellen's past, like running away with her husband's secretary; Janey only cares about Ellen's clothes, and relates the rumor that Ellen might be seeking a divorce. Newland, however, defends Ellen. After dinner, Mrs. Archer and Janey retire to the drawing room to do some needlework for May's bridal trousseau. Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Newland enjoy some cigars in the library and debate Ellen's case some more.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days later the bolt fell.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the first time, Newland has doubts about his marriage. He feels that May1s "innocence" is a contrivance of society, too fabricated to be real. He feels uncomfortable taking such an innocent woman as his wife, trading her blank page for his "page with a past. He worries that all the men around him of "perfect form" like Lawrence Lefferts lead horrible marriages of deceit and is worried that such a fate could become his own. After all, he hasn1t confided any of his "real self" to May; perhaps they will always live their lives in secret from each other. Then, the Lovell Mingotts decide to throw a reception for Ellen Olenska. But, all the people of good society reject the invitation. So, Mrs. Welland tells this to Newland and Newland tells his mother. Mrs. Archer then goes to tell her friend Louisa van der Luyden, who is one of the most reputable women in New York society.

Ellen1s arrival has clearly initiated for Newland some sort of deep critical thinking about society and his bride-to-be. Newland criticizes the innocence of his bride to be a sham, a facade. Perhaps this is the ironic commentary that we should understand as being behind the title. It is also deeply ironic that the "high-priest of form" is the one who has all sorts of affairs. Why does this society seem so corrupt at its base. Names are a point of interest in this book. Janey notes that she thinks Ellen should have changed her name to Elaine

After Mr. Sillerton Jackson leaves, Newland thinks over his marriage and finds himself comparing May, who is all virginal innocence, with Ellen and her troubled past. A few days later, the Lovell Mingotts send out a dinner invitation to a bunch of New York society notables, including the Selfridge Merrys, the Beauforts, Sillerton Jackson and his sister, the Lawrence Leffertses, the Reggie Chiverses, and essentially the entire Who's Who of New York. Forty-eight-hours later, everyone except the Beauforts and the Jacksons has RSVP'ed no. The Lovell Mingotts appeal to Mrs. Welland, who appeals to Newland, who then convinces his mother to intercede. Mrs. Archer decides to visit the van der Luydens --who are at the top of the social pyramid-- for their support.