The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust.  All the old
ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing
ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered
the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.

Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry
and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace
Church.

The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was
in sight; but there was sure to be a considerable interval of
adjustment and consultation in the lobby, where the bridesmaids were
already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms.  During this
unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness,
was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled
company; and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as
through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York
wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.
Everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put
it--in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the
flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms
had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the
same labyrinth.

So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations.
The bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley
had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire
sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye
scarf-pin; Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording
of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and
ex-lady-loves; the fees for the Bishop and the Rector were safely in
the pocket of his best man; his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson
Mingott's, where the wedding-breakfast was to take place, and so were
the travelling clothes into which he was to change; and a private
compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young
couple to their unknown destination--concealment of the spot in which
the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of
the prehistoric ritual.

"Got the ring all right?" whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who
was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight
of his responsibility.

Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make:
with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey
waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its place; then,
resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with
black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door
of the church.

Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone
vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at
which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel
step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.

"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the
same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the
Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same
towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the
same diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable
proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.

After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar
countenances in the first rows; the women's sharp with curiosity and
excitement, the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on
their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the
wedding-breakfast.

"Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's," the bridegroom could
fancy Reggie Chivers saying.  "But I'm told that Lovell Mingott
insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if
one can only get at it."  And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding
with authority:  "My dear fellow, haven't you heard?  It's to be served
at small tables, in the new English fashion."

Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother,
who had entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden's arm, sat
weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's
ermine muff.

"Poor Janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her
head around she can see only the people in the few front pews; and
they're mostly dowdy Newlands and Dagonets."

On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved
for the families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the
women with his arrogant stare.  Beside him sat his wife, all silvery
chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon, Lawrence
Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the
invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony.

Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts's keen eyes would discover in
the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had
once thought such questions important.  The things that had filled his
days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of
mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever
understood.  A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents
should be "shown" had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and
it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work
themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the
matter should have been decided (in the negative) by Mrs. Welland's
saying, with indignant tears:  "I should as soon turn the reporters
loose in my house."  Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite
and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when
everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had
seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.

"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living
somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."

"THERE THEY COME!" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom
knew better.

The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr.
Brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent
character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene
before marshalling his forces.  The door was softly shut again; then
after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran
through the church:  "The family!"

Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son.  Her large pink
face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale
blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met
with general approval; but before she had settled herself with a
stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's the spectators were
craning their necks to see who was coming after her.  Wild rumours had
been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in
spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at
the ceremony; and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting
character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk
up the nave and squeeze into a seat.  It was known that she had
insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of
taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space
between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging,
and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the
plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and
sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.

The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her
relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person
who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the
iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the
curbstone.  The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the
bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood
outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even
old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the
possibility.  "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT
IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was
hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled
with a collective shudder.  The ancestress had had to give in; but her
concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast
should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington Square
connection said) with the Wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to
have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end
of nowhere.

Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons
a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would
appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature
when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law.  Mrs.
Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies
of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but
once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's
non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black Chantilly
over lilac satin, with a bonnet of Parma violets, formed the happiest
contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum-colour.  Far different was the
impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr.
Mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and
floating scarves; and as this last apparition glided into view Archer's
heart contracted and stopped beating.

He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in
Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her
niece, Madame Olenska.  It was generally understood that their abrupt
departure was due to Madame Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from
the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded
in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the
circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for
the wedding.  For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora's
fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little
procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had
taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves
together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre,
were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby.

"Newland--I say: SHE'S HERE!" the best man whispered.

Archer roused himself with a start.

A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating,
for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the
Bishop, the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about
the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr symphony
were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride.

Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he
imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task.  The
music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of
tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of Mrs.
Archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory
murmur of the Rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink
bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and
sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and
meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his
brain.

"My God," he thought, "HAVE I got the ring?"--and once more he went
through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture.

Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her
that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened
himself and smiled into her eyes.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the Rector began ...

The ring was on her hand, the Bishop's benediction had been given, the
bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and
the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the
Mendelssohn March, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever
emerged upon New York.

"Your arm--I SAY, GIVE HER YOUR ARM!" young Newland nervously hissed;
and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the
unknown.  What was it that had sent him there, he wondered?  Perhaps
the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark
coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as
belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the
person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were
becoming subject to hallucinations.

And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried
forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to
them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with
big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the
far end of the canvas tunnel.

The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped
May's white cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brougham at her
side.  She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands
clasped under her veil.

"Darling!" Archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before
him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his
voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully:  "Yes, of course I thought
I'd lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a
bridegroom didn't go through that.  But you DID keep me waiting, you
know!  I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen."

She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her
arms about his neck.  "But none ever CAN happen now, can it, Newland,
as long as we two are together?"

Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the
young couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on
their travelling-clothes, descend the wide Mingott stairs between
laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham
under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was
still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last
weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and
settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had
already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new
dressing-bag from London.

The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal
of the bridal couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of
spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to
escape the usual "bridal suite" in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel,
had accepted with an equal alacrity.

May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly
amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where
their mysterious retreat was situated.  It was thought "very English"
to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of
distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant
wedding of the year; but where the house was no one was permitted to
know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the
knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously:  "Ah, they didn't
tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.

Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off
the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of
spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected.  May was still, in
look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes
with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as
impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher.  At
first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an
inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil
unawareness.  She was alone for the first time with her husband; but
her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday.  There was no
one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and
the culminating "lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement
and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup
person, like a "married woman," in fact.

It was wonderful that--as he had learned in the Mission garden at St.
Augustine--such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of
imagination.  But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him
by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience
had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go
through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as
it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their
transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than
a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue
or a Greek goddess.  The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might
have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her
look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor
dull, but only primitive and pure.  In the thick of this meditation
Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a
stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and
of Granny Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it.

May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject.  "I was surprised,
though--weren't you?--that aunt Medora came after all.  Ellen wrote
that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do
wish it had been she who had recovered!  Did you see the exquisite old
lace she sent me?"

He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had
somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.

"Yes--I--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly,
and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his
carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.

"Aren't you tired?  It will be good to have some tea when we
arrive--I'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready," he
rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly
to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the
Beauforts had sent, and which "went" so perfectly with uncle Lovell
Mingott's trays and side-dishes.

In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and
they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.

"Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens--they've sent their man
over from Skuytercliff to meet us," Archer exclaimed, as a sedate
person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.

"I'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary, "that a little accident
has occurred at the Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.  It
happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this
morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's
house ready.  It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir;
and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be
exactly the same as if you'd been at Rhinebeck."

Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more
apologetic accents:  "It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure
you--" and May's eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed
silence:  "The same as Rhinebeck?  The Patroon's house?  But it will be
a hundred thousand times better--won't it, Newland?  It's too dear and
kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."

And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their
shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly:
"Only fancy, I've never been inside it--have you?  The van der Luydens
show it to so few people.  But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and
she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it's the only
house she's seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly
happy in."

"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband
gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile:  "Ah, it's just our luck
beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"

"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and
his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental
Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people
whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously
avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not
"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in
foreign countries.

Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so
unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances
of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,
that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a
word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and
railway-stations.  Their own compatriots--save those previously known
or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced
disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at
Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage
(whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known
to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle
of liniment.  The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--had
been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who
never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately
able to produce the required remedy.

Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were
travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies,
who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid
helped to nurse the invalid back to health.

When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle again.  Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would
have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of
a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service.
But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown,
and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves
linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had
been so kind at Botzen.  With touching fidelity they seized every
chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their
continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding
out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the
States.  The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey,
whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by
two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in
Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness
Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits.
As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the
tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought
"only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies,
who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under
glass.  And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England,
Mrs. Archer's last word had been:  "You must take May to see Mrs.
Carfry."

Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but
Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them
an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer
was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

"It's all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them.  But I shall feel
so shy among a lot of people I've never met.  And what shall I wear?"

Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.  She looked
handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.  The moist English air seemed
to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight
hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow
of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

"Wear, dearest?  I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris
last week."

"Yes, of course.  I meant to say that I shan't know WHICH to wear."
She pouted a little.  "I've never dined out in London; and I don't want
to be ridiculous."

He tried to enter into her perplexity.  "But don't Englishwomen dress
just like everybody else in the evening?"

"Newland!  How can you ask such funny questions?  When they go to the
theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."

"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle won't.  They'll wear caps like my mother's--and
shawls; very soft shawls."

"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"

"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly
developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.

She pushed back her chair with a sigh.  "That's dear of you, Newland;
but it doesn't help me much."

He had an inspiration.  "Why not wear your wedding-dress?  That can't
be wrong, can it?"

"Oh, dearest!  If I only had it here!  But it's gone to Paris to be
made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."

"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up.  "Look here--the fog's lifting.
If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a
glimpse of the pictures."

The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months'
wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely
summarised as "blissful."

They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not
been able to picture his wife in that particular setting.  Her own
inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for
mountaineering in July and swimming in August.  This plan they
punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and
August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which
some one had recommended as quaint and quiet.  Once or twice, in the
mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; and
May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied:
"It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to
be in New York."

But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had
expected.  She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an
enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand
at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got
back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered
HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she
looked forward to sailing.

In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and
she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret
to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage.  It
was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as
all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice
the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest
notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that
May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be
to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.  Her innate dignity
would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might
even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it
altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good.  But
with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers
such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly
outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him
made that unthinkable.  Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be
loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of
the same virtues.

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind.  If her
simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed
and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were
on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of
all his old traditions and reverences.

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,
though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at
once how they would fall into place in their proper setting.  He had no
fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within
it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife
would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.
And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would
be filled.

All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive
from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister
lived.  Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends'
hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always
travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty
unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings.  Once only, just
after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of
queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in
palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the
fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun
in the world, as unreal as a carnival.  These queer cosmopolitan women,
deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need
of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers
and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their
confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up
among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics,
to detain his imagination long.  To introduce his wife into such a
society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no
other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of
St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had
said:  "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American would
have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was
without a sequel.  They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt,
the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had
purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their
arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to
these unknown relatives.

"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at
this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said
to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her
sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her
to the London grime.

"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,
with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck
again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American
women for the social advantages of dress.

"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown,
and their defiance of it."  And he understood for the first time the
earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her
hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and
ordering her extensive wardrobe.

He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small
one.  Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long
chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was
her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a
small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,
pronouncing a French name as she did so.

Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a
swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more
voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he
perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an
extreme and infantile shyness.

"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes
implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was
calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms.  But beauty, even
when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and
the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their
desire to put her at her ease.

In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing
affair.  Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her
ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her
references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to
admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee.  The Vicar soon
abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and
accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until
the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the
drawing-room.

The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a
meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed
off to bed.  But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,
and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his
last symposium with Ned Winsett.  The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had
been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for
Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman.  Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who
had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he
went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without
one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts.  He was a man
of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called
him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense
expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his
animation.

His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and
it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an
insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,
then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after
other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into
tutoring English youths in Switzerland.  Before that, however, he had
lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by
Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's
house.  He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious
(having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was
apparent that his literary ambitions had failed.  His situation, in
fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who
loved ideas need hunger mentally.  As it was precisely of that love
that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of
vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so
richly in his poverty.

"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's
intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,
one's critical independence?  It was because of that that I abandoned
journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private
secretaryship.  There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a
soi.  And when one hears good talk one can join in it without
compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer
it inwardly.  Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.  And so I have never
regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms
of the same self-abdication."  He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he
lit another cigarette.  "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life
in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?  But, after
all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to
grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as
chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge.  Do you
suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in
New York?"

Archer looked at him with startled eyes.  New York, for a young man who
had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of
ideas the only one worth living!  He continued to stare at M.  Riviere
perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and
advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.

"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered,
utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could
offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only
necessity.

A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere's sallow skin.  "I--I thought it
your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he
rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of
having asked a favour, he went on hastily:  "One throws out random
suggestions--more to one's self than to others.  In reality, I see no
immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a
trace of constraint:  "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be
taking you upstairs."

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.  His
hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first
impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was
beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately
yield to their first impulses.

"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good
talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in
the hansom.

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had
read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the
key to them.

"The little Frenchman?  Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned
coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at
having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French
tutor.  The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment
ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of what
was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands.  If May's
parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have
offered them something more substantial than a parson and a
schoolmaster.

But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

"Common--common WHERE?" he queried; and she returned with unusual
readiness:  "Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room.  Those
people are always awkward in society.  But then," she added
disarmingly, "I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."

Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use
of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to
dwell on the things he disliked in her.  After all, her point of view
had always been the same.  It was that of all the people he had grown
up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.
Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at
life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the
nice.

"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May
echoed, bewildered:  "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"

"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.
But I did rather want another talk with him.  He's looking for a job in
New York."

Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that
she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."

"A job in New York?  What sort of a job?  People don't have French
tutors: what does he want to do?"

"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband
retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh.  "Oh,
Newland, how funny!  Isn't that FRENCH?"

On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her
refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Riviere.  Another
after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of
New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit
M. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.

He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many
problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the
hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge
in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the
most difficult in marriage.  "After that I suppose we shall have pretty
nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the
worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very
angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

Newland stands on the chancel step of Grace Church, waiting for his bride, his mind is utterly in a fog. When Medora Manson enters, Newland strains to see if Ellen has accompanied her, but Ellen has not come. Newland has to be reminded to give May his arm. The ceremony ends and all go to the wedding breakfast. The couple changes after the wedding breakfast, enjoys the traditional rice shower, and goes to the train station where they will journey to a country estate near Skuytercliff. When they arrive, the van der Luyden's servant informs them that they will have to use the Patroon's house because of a water-tank leak. May is excited, but Newland is all the while thinking of his afternoon there last winter with Ellen. The following autumn finds Newland and May in London, having spent three months touring on their honeymoon. They are invited to dinner with a Mrs. Carfry and her sister, acquaintances of Newland's mother and sister. May is very uncomfortable and has no interest in exchanging pleasantries with two non-Americans who are strangers. Once back at the hotel, Newland and May discuss the hostesses, their invalid nephew, a vicar and his wife, and a French tutor named M. Riviere. May dismisses the tutor as very "common looking," but Newland had enjoyed talking with him about Parisian literary figures.

Wharton overwhelmingly sets a tone of irony in this wedding where the groom loves someone else. Newland, trapped in this social institution, muddles through the dignified ritual as if it were unreal. He senses the death of his spirit and even imagines the onlookers in their correct pews when he eventually enters the afterlife. Seeing May, he realizes there is no turning back. Wharton also reveals the values of this society. Newland has handled the obligatory duties of the groom. His choices would all be approved by Lawrence Lefferts' satisfactory comments on "Good Form." Newland thinks back to when those things were so important to him, and he realizes how meaningless they were. "And all the while, I suppose . . . real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them." Buried alive in tradition and New York form, he watches his chances of freedom fading. The ultimate irony is that he and May will spend their wedding night in the very house where Newland and Ellen sought a safe haven. Unaware of her irony, May excitedly explains "it's the only house  seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly happy in." Newland drops deeper into the void. The forced intimacy of the three-month wedding tour reveals Archer's fears that there are things he does not like about his new wife. She does not like to travel, she pouts, and she reveals a snobbishness that gives her an icy exterior. Her world is New York City and she will "always be loyal, gallant and unresentful," but also unflinchingly provincial. In short, she is exactly what she has been trained to be: the perfect wife with no clue about her servitude. Newland enjoys and even envies the impoverished tutor because he has spoken with literary figures in Paris, but May speaks of him with disdain. While Archer copes by thinking the first six months of marriage are the most difficult, he also fears May is rounding off any tendency of his to be less than conventional. He begins to see his servitude as she arranges his orthodox life. Glossary alacrity eager willingness or readiness, often manifested by quick, lively action. vicissitudes difficulties that are likely to occur.