The Countess Olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour
Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant
wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired,
far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora.

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in.  Small
dress-makers, bird-stuffers and "people who wrote" were her nearest
neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a
dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer
and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and
then, had mentioned that he lived.  Winsett did not invite people to
his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a
nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little
shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Madame Olenska's own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance
only by a little more paint about the window-frames; and as Archer
mustered its modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must
have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day.  He had lunched with the
Wellands, hoping afterward to carry off May for a walk in the Park.  He
wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had
looked the night before, and how proud he was of her, and to press her
to hasten their marriage.  But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him
that the round of family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted
at advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful eye-brows
and sighed out:  "Twelve dozen of everything--hand-embroidered--"

Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to
another, and Archer, when the afternoon's round was over, parted from
his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild
animal cunningly trapped.  He supposed that his readings in
anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after
all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling; but when he
remembered that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take place
till the following autumn, and pictured what his life would be till
then, a dampness fell upon his spirit.

"Tomorrow," Mrs. Welland called after him, "we'll do the Chiverses and
the Dallases"; and he perceived that she was going through their two
families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter
of the alphabet.

He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska's request--her
command, rather--that he should call on her that afternoon; but in the
brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to
say.  Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the
matter.  He knew that May most particularly wanted him to be kind to
her cousin; was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of
their engagement?  It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but
for the Countess's arrival, he might have been, if not still a free
man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged.  But May had willed it
so, and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility--and
therefore at liberty, if he chose, to call on her cousin without
telling her.

As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity was his uppermost
feeling.  He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him; he
concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent
bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian.
She welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries
by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into
a low firelit drawing-room.  The room was empty, and she left him, for
an appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to find her
mistress, or whether she had not understood what he was there for, and
thought it might be to wind the clock--of which he perceived that the
only visible specimen had stopped.  He knew that the southern races
communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was
mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible.  At length
she returned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a
phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer: "La signora e
fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took to mean:  "She's out--but you'll
soon see."

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded
shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known.  He knew that the
Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of
wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed, were represented by
some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze
on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the
discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in
old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art.  His
boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest
books: John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of
P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called "The Renaissance" by
Walter Pater.  He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra
Angelico with a faint condescension.  But these pictures bewildered
him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and
therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy; and perhaps, also,
his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding
himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected
him.  He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess
Olenska's request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his
betrothed might come in to see her cousin.  What would she think if she
found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting
alone in the dusk at a lady's fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and
stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him;
but Archer felt more curious than mortified.  The atmosphere of the
room was so different from any he had ever breathed that
self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.  He had been
before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures "of the
Italian school"; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson's
shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and
Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a
few properties, been transformed into something intimate, "foreign,"
subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.  He tried to
analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and
tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of
which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the
slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was
not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some
far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and
dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what May's drawing-room would
look like.  He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving "very
handsomely," already had his eye on a newly built house in East
Thirty-ninth Street.  The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the
house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger
architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone
of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce;
but the plumbing was perfect.  Archer would have liked to travel, to
put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an
extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were
firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple.  The young man
felt that his fate was sealed: for the rest of his life he would go up
every evening between the cast-iron railings of that greenish-yellow
doorstep, and pass through a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a
wainscoting of varnished yellow wood.  But beyond that his imagination
could not travel.  He knew the drawing-room above had a bay window, but
he could not fancy how May would deal with it.  She submitted
cheerfully to the purple satin and yellow tuftings of the Welland
drawing-room, to its sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern
Saxe.  He saw no reason to suppose that she would want anything
different in her own house; and his only comfort was to reflect that
she would probably let him arrange his library as he pleased--which
would be, of course, with "sincere" Eastlake furniture, and the plain
new bookcases without glass doors.

The round-bosomed maid came in, drew the curtains, pushed back a log,
and said consolingly: "Verra--verra."  When she had gone Archer stood
up and began to wander about.  Should he wait any longer?  His position
was becoming rather foolish.  Perhaps he had misunderstood Madame
Olenska--perhaps she had not invited him after all.

Down the cobblestones of the quiet street came the ring of a stepper's
hoofs; they stopped before the house, and he caught the opening of a
carriage door.  Parting the curtains he looked out into the early dusk.
A street-lamp faced him, and in its light he saw Julius Beaufort's
compact English brougham, drawn by a big roan, and the banker
descending from it, and helping out Madame Olenska.

Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion
seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his
carriage while she mounted the steps.

When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer
there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.

"How do you like my funny house?" she asked.  "To me it's like heaven."

As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away
with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.

"You've arranged it delightfully," he rejoined, alive to the flatness
of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming
desire to be simple and striking.

"Oh, it's a poor little place.  My relations despise it.  But at any
rate it's less gloomy than the van der Luydens'."

The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious
spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der
Luydens gloomy.  Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke
of it as "handsome."  But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice
to the general shiver.

"It's delicious--what you've done here," he repeated.

"I like the little house," she admitted; "but I suppose what I like is
the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town;
and then, of being alone in it."  She spoke so low that he hardly heard
the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.

"You like so much to be alone?"

"Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely."  She sat down
near the fire, said:  "Nastasia will bring the tea presently," and
signed to him to return to his armchair, adding:  "I see you've already
chosen your corner."

Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the
fire under drooping lids.

"This is the hour I like best--don't you?"

A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: "I was afraid you'd
forgotten the hour.  Beaufort must have been very engrossing."

She looked amused.  "Why--have you waited long?  Mr. Beaufort took me
to see a number of houses--since it seems I'm not to be allowed to stay
in this one."  She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from
her mind, and went on:  "I've never been in a city where there seems to
be such a feeling against living in des quartiers excentriques.  What
does it matter where one lives?  I'm told this street is respectable."

"It's not fashionable."

"Fashionable!  Do you all think so much of that?  Why not make one's
own fashions?  But I suppose I've lived too independently; at any rate,
I want to do what you all do--I want to feel cared for and safe."

He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her
need of guidance.

"That's what your friends want you to feel.  New York's an awfully safe
place," he added with a flash of sarcasm.

"Yes, isn't it?  One feels that," she cried, missing the mockery.
"Being here is like--like--being taken on a holiday when one has been a
good little girl and done all one's lessons."

The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him.  He did
not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one
else take the same tone.  He wondered if she did not begin to see what
a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her.  The
Lovell Mingotts' dinner, patched up in extremis out of all sorts of
social odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her
escape; but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted
disaster, or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van
der Luyden evening.  Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied
that her New York was still completely undifferentiated, and the
conjecture nettled him.

"Last night," he said, "New York laid itself out for you.  The van der
Luydens do nothing by halves."

"No: how kind they are!  It was such a nice party.  Every one seems to
have such an esteem for them."

The terms were hardly adequate; she might have spoken in that way of a
tea-party at the dear old Miss Lannings'.

"The van der Luydens," said Archer, feeling himself pompous as he
spoke, "are the most powerful influence in New York society.
Unfortunately--owing to her health--they receive very seldom."

She unclasped her hands from behind her head, and looked at him
meditatively.

"Isn't that perhaps the reason?"

"The reason--?"

"For their great influence; that they make themselves so rare."

He coloured a little, stared at her--and suddenly felt the penetration
of the remark.  At a stroke she had pricked the van der Luydens and
they collapsed.  He laughed, and sacrificed them.

Nastasia brought the tea, with handleless Japanese cups and little
covered dishes, placing the tray on a low table.

"But you'll explain these things to me--you'll tell me all I ought to
know," Madame Olenska continued, leaning forward to hand him his cup.

"It's you who are telling me; opening my eyes to things I'd looked at
so long that I'd ceased to see them."

She detached a small gold cigarette-case from one of her bracelets,
held it out to him, and took a cigarette herself.  On the chimney were
long spills for lighting them.

"Ah, then we can both help each other.  But I want help so much more.
You must tell me just what to do."

It was on the tip of his tongue to reply:  "Don't be seen driving about
the streets with Beaufort--" but he was being too deeply drawn into the
atmosphere of the room, which was her atmosphere, and to give advice of
that sort would have been like telling some one who was bargaining for
attar-of-roses in Samarkand that one should always be provided with
arctics for a New York winter.  New York seemed much farther off than
Samarkand, and if they were indeed to help each other she was rendering
what might prove the first of their mutual services by making him look
at his native city objectively.  Viewed thus, as through the wrong end
of a telescope, it looked disconcertingly small and distant; but then
from Samarkand it would.

A flame darted from the logs and she bent over the fire, stretching her
thin hands so close to it that a faint halo shone about the oval nails.
The light touched to russet the rings of dark hair escaping from her
braids, and made her pale face paler.

"There are plenty of people to tell you what to do," Archer rejoined,
obscurely envious of them.

"Oh--all my aunts?  And my dear old Granny?"  She considered the idea
impartially.  "They're all a little vexed with me for setting up for
myself--poor Granny especially.  She wanted to keep me with her; but I
had to be free--"  He was impressed by this light way of speaking of
the formidable Catherine, and moved by the thought of what must have
given Madame Olenska this thirst for even the loneliest kind of
freedom.  But the idea of Beaufort gnawed him.

"I think I understand how you feel," he said.  "Still, your family can
advise you; explain differences; show you the way."

She lifted her thin black eyebrows.  "Is New York such a labyrinth?  I
thought it so straight up and down--like Fifth Avenue.  And with all
the cross streets numbered!"  She seemed to guess his faint disapproval
of this, and added, with the rare smile that enchanted her whole face:
"If you knew how I like it for just THAT--the straight-up-and-downness,
and the big honest labels on everything!"

He saw his chance.  "Everything may be labelled--but everybody is not."

"Perhaps.  I may simplify too much--but you'll warn me if I do."  She
turned from the fire to look at him.  "There are only two people here
who make me feel as if they understood what I mean and could explain
things to me: you and Mr. Beaufort."

Archer winced at the joining of the names, and then, with a quick
readjustment, understood, sympathised and pitied.  So close to the
powers of evil she must have lived that she still breathed more freely
in their air.  But since she felt that he understood her also, his
business would be to make her see Beaufort as he really was, with all
he represented--and abhor it.

He answered gently:  "I understand.  But just at first don't let go of
your old friends' hands: I mean the older women, your Granny Mingott,
Mrs. Welland, Mrs. van der Luyden.  They like and admire you--they want
to help you."

She shook her head and sighed.  "Oh, I know--I know!  But on condition
that they don't hear anything unpleasant.  Aunt Welland put it in those
very words when I tried....  Does no one want to know the truth here,
Mr. Archer?  The real loneliness is living among all these kind people
who only ask one to pretend!" She lifted her hands to her face, and he
saw her thin shoulders shaken by a sob.

"Madame Olenska!--Oh, don't, Ellen," he cried, starting up and bending
over her.  He drew down one of her hands, clasping and chafing it like
a child's while he murmured reassuring words; but in a moment she freed
herself, and looked up at him with wet lashes.

"Does no one cry here, either?  I suppose there's no need to, in
heaven," she said, straightening her loosened braids with a laugh, and
bending over the tea-kettle.  It was burnt into his consciousness that
he had called her "Ellen"--called her so twice; and that she had not
noticed it.  Far down the inverted telescope he saw the faint white
figure of May Welland--in New York.

Suddenly Nastasia put her head in to say something in her rich Italian.

Madame Olenska, again with a hand at her hair, uttered an exclamation
of assent--a flashing "Gia--gia"--and the Duke of St. Austrey entered,
piloting a tremendous blackwigged and red-plumed lady in overflowing
furs.

"My dear Countess, I've brought an old friend of mine to see you--Mrs.
Struthers.  She wasn't asked to the party last night, and she wants to
know you."

The Duke beamed on the group, and Madame Olenska advanced with a murmur
of welcome toward the queer couple.  She seemed to have no idea how
oddly matched they were, nor what a liberty the Duke had taken in
bringing his companion--and to do him justice, as Archer perceived, the
Duke seemed as unaware of it himself.

"Of course I want to know you, my dear," cried Mrs. Struthers in a
round rolling voice that matched her bold feathers and her brazen wig.
"I want to know everybody who's young and interesting and charming.
And the Duke tells me you like music--didn't you, Duke?  You're a
pianist yourself, I believe?  Well, do you want to hear Sarasate play
tomorrow evening at my house?  You know I've something going on every
Sunday evening--it's the day when New York doesn't know what to do with
itself, and so I say to it:  'Come and be amused.'  And the Duke
thought you'd be tempted by Sarasate.  You'll find a number of your
friends."

Madame Olenska's face grew brilliant with pleasure.  "How kind!  How
good of the Duke to think of me!" She pushed a chair up to the
tea-table and Mrs. Struthers sank into it delectably.  "Of course I
shall be too happy to come."

"That's all right, my dear.  And bring your young gentleman with you."
Mrs. Struthers extended a hail-fellow hand to Archer.  "I can't put a
name to you--but I'm sure I've met you--I've met everybody, here, or in
Paris or London.  Aren't you in diplomacy?  All the diplomatists come
to me.  You like music too?  Duke, you must be sure to bring him."

The Duke said "Rather" from the depths of his beard, and Archer
withdrew with a stiffly circular bow that made him feel as full of
spine as a self-conscious school-boy among careless and unnoticing
elders.

He was not sorry for the denouement of his visit: he only wished it had
come sooner, and spared him a certain waste of emotion.  As he went out
into the wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent, and May
Welland the loveliest woman in it.  He turned into his florist's to
send her the daily box of lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion,
he found he had forgotten that morning.

As he wrote a word on his card and waited for an envelope he glanced
about the embowered shop, and his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses.
He had never seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse was
to send them to May instead of the lilies.  But they did not look like
her--there was something too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty.
In a sudden revulsion of mood, and almost without knowing what he did,
he signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long box, and
slipped his card into a second envelope, on which he wrote the name of
the Countess Olenska; then, just as he was turning away, he drew the
card out again, and left the empty envelope on the box.

"They'll go at once?" he enquired, pointing to the roses.

The florist assured him that they would.

The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after
luncheon.  As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York,
she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons; but
Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her
over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a
hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.

The day was delectable.  The bare vaulting of trees along the Mall was
ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched above snow that shone like
splintered crystals.  It was the weather to call out May's radiance,
and she burned like a young maple in the frost.  Archer was proud of
the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of possessorship cleared
away his underlying perplexities.

"It's so delicious--waking every morning to smell lilies-of-the-valley
in one's room!" she said.

"Yesterday they came late.  I hadn't time in the morning--"

"But your remembering each day to send them makes me love them so much
more than if you'd given a standing order, and they came every morning
on the minute, like one's music-teacher--as I know Gertrude Lefferts's
did, for instance, when she and Lawrence were engaged."

"Ah--they would!" laughed Archer, amused at her keenness.  He looked
sideways at her fruit-like cheek and felt rich and secure enough to
add:  "When I sent your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather
gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame Olenska.  Was that
right?"

"How dear of you!  Anything of that kind delights her.  It's odd she
didn't mention it: she lunched with us today, and spoke of Mr.
Beaufort's having sent her wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der
Luyden a whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff.  She seems so
surprised to receive flowers.  Don't people send them in Europe?  She
thinks it such a pretty custom."

"Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by Beaufort's," said Archer
irritably.  Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the
roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them.  He wanted to say:  "I
called on your cousin yesterday," but hesitated.  If Madame Olenska had
not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should.  Yet not
to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked.  To shake
off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and
Mrs. Welland's insistence on a long engagement.

"If you call it long!  Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two
years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a year and a half.  Why aren't we
very well off as we are?"

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of
himself for finding it singularly childish.  No doubt she simply echoed
what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday,
and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.

"Never, if we won't let them, I suppose," he mused, and recalled his
mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: "Women ought to be as free as we
are--"

It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young
woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world.  But how many
generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended
bandaged to the family vault?  He shivered a little, remembering some
of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance
of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because
they had no use for them.  What if, when he had bidden May Welland to
open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

"We might be much better off.  We might be altogether together--we
might travel."

Her face lit up.  "That would be lovely," she owned: she would love to
travel.  But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things
so differently.

"As if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer
insisted.

"Newland!  You're so original!" she exulted.

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young
men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making
the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make--even to the
point of calling him original.

"Original!  We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the
same folded paper.  We're like patterns stencilled on a wall.  Can't
you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and
her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.

"Mercy--shall we elope?" she laughed.

"If you would--"

"You DO love me, Newland!  I'm so happy."

"But then--why not be happier?"

"We can't behave like people in novels, though, can we?"

"Why not--why not--why not?"

She looked a little bored by his insistence.  She knew very well that
they couldn't, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason.
"I'm not clever enough to argue with you.  But that kind of thing is
rather--vulgar, isn't it?" she suggested, relieved to have hit on a
word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"

She was evidently staggered by this.  "Of course I should hate it--so
would you," she rejoined, a trifle irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; and
feeling that she had indeed found the right way of closing the
discussion, she went on light-heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I
showed Ellen my ring?  She thinks it the most beautiful setting she
ever saw.  There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said.  I
do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!"

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in
his study, Janey wandered in on him.  He had failed to stop at his club
on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the
law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his
class.  He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a
haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour
besieged his brain.

"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word running through his head
like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures
lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at
the club at that hour he had gone home instead.  He knew not only what
they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take
in the discussion.  The Duke of course would be their principal theme;
though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a
small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which
Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be
thoroughly gone into.  Such "women" (as they were called) were few in
New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the
appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour
had profoundly agitated society.  Only the day before, her carriage had
passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott's, and the latter had instantly rung the
little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home.
"What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?" people asked each
other with a shudder.  Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that
very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.

He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then
quickly bent over his book (Swinburne's "Chastelard"--just out) as if
he had not seen her.  She glanced at the writing-table heaped with
books, opened a volume of the "Contes Drolatiques," made a wry face
over the archaic French, and sighed:  "What learned things you read!"

"Well--?" he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.

"Mother's very angry."

"Angry?  With whom?  About what?"

"Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here.  She brought word that her
brother would come in after dinner: she couldn't say very much, because
he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself.  He's
with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now."

"For heaven's sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start.  It would take an
omniscient Deity to know what you're talking about."

"It's not a time to be profane, Newland....  Mother feels badly enough
about your not going to church ..."

With a groan he plunged back into his book.

"NEWLAND!  Do listen.  Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel
Struthers's party last night: she went there with the Duke and Mr.
Beaufort."

At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the
young man's breast.  To smother it he laughed.  "Well, what of it?  I
knew she meant to."

Janey paled and her eyes began to project.  "You knew she meant to--and
you didn't try to stop her?  To warn her?"

"Stop her?  Warn her?"  He laughed again.  "I'm not engaged to be
married to the Countess Olenska!"  The words had a fantastic sound in
his own ears.

"You're marrying into her family."

"Oh, family--family!" he jeered.

"Newland--don't you care about Family?"

"Not a brass farthing."

"Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?"

"Not the half of one--if she thinks such old maid's rubbish."

"Mother is not an old maid," said his virgin sister with pinched lips.

He felt like shouting back:  "Yes, she is, and so are the van der
Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed
by the wing-tip of Reality." But he saw her long gentle face puckering
into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.

"Hang Countess Olenska!  Don't be a goose, Janey--I'm not her keeper."

"No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner so
that we might all back her up; and if it hadn't been for that cousin
Louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke."

"Well--what harm was there in inviting her?  She was the best-looking
woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the
usual van der Luyden banquet."

"You know cousin Henry asked her to please you: he persuaded cousin
Louisa.  And now they're so upset that they're going back to
Skuytercliff tomorrow.  I think, Newland, you'd better come down.  You
don't seem to understand how mother feels."

In the drawing-room Newland found his mother.  She raised a troubled
brow from her needlework to ask: "Has Janey told you?"

"Yes."  He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own.  "But I can't
take it very seriously."

"Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?"

"The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess
Olenska's going to the house of a woman they consider common."

"Consider--!"

"Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday
evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition."

"Good music?  All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table
and sang the things they sing at the places you go to in Paris.  There
was smoking and champagne."

"Well--that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still
goes on."

"I don't suppose, dear, you're really defending the French Sunday?"

"I've heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday
when we've been in London."

"New York is neither Paris nor London."

"Oh, no, it's not!" her son groaned.

"You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant?  You're
right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our
ways when they come among us.  Ellen Olenska especially: she came back
to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies."

Newland made no answer, and after a moment his mother ventured:  "I was
going to put on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa
for a moment before dinner."  He frowned, and she continued: "I thought
you might explain to her what you've just said: that society abroad is
different ... that people are not as particular, and that Madame
Olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things.  It would
be, you know, dear," she added with an innocent adroitness, "in Madame
Olenska's interest if you did."

"Dearest mother, I really don't see how we're concerned in the matter.
The Duke took Madame Olenska to Mrs. Struthers's--in fact he brought
Mrs. Struthers to call on her.  I was there when they came.  If the van
der Luydens want to quarrel with anybody, the real culprit is under
their own roof."

"Quarrel?  Newland, did you ever know of cousin Henry's quarrelling?
Besides, the Duke's his guest; and a stranger too.  Strangers don't
discriminate: how should they?  Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and
should have respected the feelings of New York."

"Well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw
Madame Olenska to them," cried her son, exasperated.  "I don't see
myself--or you either--offering ourselves up to expiate her crimes."

"Oh, of course you see only the Mingott side," his mother answered, in
the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger.

The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced:
"Mr. Henry van der Luyden."

Mrs. Archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back with an
agitated hand.

"Another lamp," she cried to the retreating servant, while Janey bent
over to straighten her mother's cap.

Mr. van der Luyden's figure loomed on the threshold, and Newland Archer
went forward to greet his cousin.

"We were just talking about you, sir," he said.

Mr. van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement.  He drew off
his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat
shyly, while Janey pushed an arm-chair forward, and Archer continued:
"And the Countess Olenska."

Mrs. Archer paled.

"Ah--a charming woman.  I have just been to see her," said Mr. van der
Luyden, complacency restored to his brow.  He sank into the chair, laid
his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way,
and went on:  "She has a real gift for arranging flowers.  I had sent
her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished.  Instead
of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had
scattered them about loosely, here and there ... I can't say how.  The
Duke had told me: he said:  'Go and see how cleverly she's arranged her
drawing-room.'  And she has.  I should really like to take Louisa to
see her, if the neighbourhood were not so--unpleasant."

A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from Mr. van der
Luyden.  Mrs. Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which
she had nervously tumbled it, and Newland, leaning against the
chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand,
saw Janey's gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.

"The fact is," Mr. van der Luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg
with a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon's great signet-ring,
"the fact is, I dropped in to thank her for the very pretty note she
wrote me about my flowers; and also--but this is between ourselves, of
course--to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke to carry
her off to parties with him.  I don't know if you've heard--"

Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile.  "Has the Duke been carrying
her off to parties?"

"You know what these English grandees are.  They're all alike.  Louisa
and I are very fond of our cousin--but it's hopeless to expect people
who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about
our little republican distinctions.  The Duke goes where he's amused."
Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke.  "Yes--it seems he took
her with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's.  Sillerton Jackson
has just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather
troubled.  So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess
Olenska and explain--by the merest hint, you know--how we feel in New
York about certain things.  I felt I might, without indelicacy, because
the evening she dined with us she rather suggested ... rather let me
see that she would be grateful for guidance.  And she WAS."

Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been
self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions.  On
his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer's countenance
dutifully reflected.

"How kind you both are, dear Henry--always!  Newland will particularly
appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new
relations."

She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said: "Immensely, sir.
But I was sure you'd like Madame Olenska."

Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness.  "I never ask
to my house, my dear Newland," he said, "any one whom I do not like.
And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson."  With a glance at the clock
he rose and added:  "But Louisa will be waiting.  We are dining early,
to take the Duke to the Opera."

After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence
fell upon the Archer family.

"Gracious--how romantic!" at last broke explosively from Janey.  No one
knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had
long since given up trying to interpret them.

Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh.  "Provided it all turns out for
the best," she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will
not.  "Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes
this evening: I really shan't know what to say to him."

"Poor mother!  But he won't come--" her son laughed, stooping to kiss
away her frown.

Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in
his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low,
attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.

Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations
of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident
perplexity.  As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his
hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his
disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family
Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.

"My dear sir--" he always addressed Archer as "sir"--"I have sent for
you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment, I
prefer not to mention either to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood."  The
gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for,
as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New
York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since
dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking,
his own grandson.

He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow.  "For family
reasons--" he continued.

Archer looked up.

"The Mingott family," said Mr. Letterblair with an explanatory smile
and bow.  "Mrs. Manson Mingott sent for me yesterday.  Her
grand-daughter the Countess Olenska wishes to sue her husband for
divorce.  Certain papers have been placed in my hands."  He paused and
drummed on his desk.  "In view of your prospective alliance with the
family I should like to consult you--to consider the case with
you--before taking any farther steps."

Archer felt the blood in his temples.  He had seen the Countess Olenska
only once since his visit to her, and then at the Opera, in the Mingott
box.  During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate
image, receding from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful
place in it.  He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey's
first random allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded
gossip.  Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful
to him as to his mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no
doubt prompted by old Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently
planning to draw him into the affair.  After all, there were plenty of
Mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a Mingott by
marriage.

He waited for the senior partner to continue.  Mr. Letterblair unlocked
a drawer and drew out a packet.  "If you will run your eye over these
papers--"

Archer frowned.  "I beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the
prospective relationship, I should prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth
or Mr. Redwood."

Mr. Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended.  It was unusual
for a junior to reject such an opening.

He bowed.  "I respect your scruple, sir; but in this case I believe
true delicacy requires you to do as I ask.  Indeed, the suggestion is
not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott's and her son's.  I have seen Lovell
Mingott; and also Mr. Welland.  They all named you."

Archer felt his temper rising.  He had been somewhat languidly drifting
with events for the last fortnight, and letting May's fair looks and
radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the
Mingott claims.  But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott's roused him to a
sense of what the clan thought they had the right to exact from a
prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role.

"Her uncles ought to deal with this," he said.

"They have.  The matter has been gone into by the family.  They are
opposed to the Countess's idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal
opinion."

The young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand.

"Does she want to marry again?"

"I believe it is suggested; but she denies it."

"Then--"

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?
Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my
opinion."

Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents.  Since their
last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in
ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska.  His hour alone with
her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which
the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the
Countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement
in the van der Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch
of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly
gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need
either the private consolations or the public championship of a young
man of his small compass.  To look at the matter in this light
simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim
domestic virtues.  He could not picture May Welland, in whatever
conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and
lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed to
him finer or fairer than in the week that followed.  He had even
yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one
disarming answer to his plea for haste.

"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you
have your way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she
had answered, with her clearest look:  "Yes; and that's what makes it
so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a
little girl."

That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would
like always to be sure of his wife's making.  If one had habitually
breathed the New York air there were times when anything less
crystalline seemed stifling.

The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but
they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's
solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied for
the settlement of her financial situation.  There was also a short
letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer
rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered Mr.
Letterblair's office.

"Here are the letters, sir.  If you wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he
said in a constrained voice.

"Thank you--thank you, Mr. Archer.  Come and dine with me tonight if
you're free, and we'll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish
to call on our client tomorrow."

Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon.  It was a
winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon
above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the
pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr.
Letterblair were closeted together after dinner.  It was impossible to
decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska himself
rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes.  A great wave of
compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood
before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs
from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.

He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be
spared whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the
thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New
York air so pure.  "Are we only Pharisees after all?" he wondered,
puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human
vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty.

For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had
always been.  He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of
risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs.
Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming
air of adventure.  But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman";
foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the
secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he
possessed.  When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but
now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case.  The affair, in short,
had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been
through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed
belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and
respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied.  In this view they were
sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female
relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things
happened" it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always
criminal of the woman.  All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew
regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous
and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.
The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to
marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.

In the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess,
love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified.  Rich
and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such
situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally
sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from
sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable
by conventional standards.

On reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at
what hour of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a
messenger-boy, who returned presently with a word to the effect that
she was going to Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with
the van der Luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening
after dinner.  The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet,
without date or address, but her hand was firm and free.  He was amused
at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of Skuytercliff,
but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would
most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the "unpleasant."

He was at Mr. Letterblair's punctually at seven, glad of the pretext
for excusing himself soon after dinner.  He had formed his own opinion
from the papers entrusted to him, and did not especially want to go
into the matter with his senior partner.  Mr. Letterblair was a
widower, and they dined alone, copiously and slowly, in a dark shabby
room hung with yellowing prints of "The Death of Chatham" and "The
Coronation of Napoleon."  On the sideboard, between fluted Sheraton
knife-cases, stood a decanter of Haut Brion, and another of the old
Lanning port (the gift of a client), which the wastrel Tom Lanning had
sold off a year or two before his mysterious and discreditable death in
San Francisco--an incident less publicly humiliating to the family than
the sale of the cellar.

After a velvety oyster soup came shad and cucumbers, then a young
broiled turkey with corn fritters, followed by a canvas-back with
currant jelly and a celery mayonnaise.  Mr. Letterblair, who lunched on
a sandwich and tea, dined deliberately and deeply, and insisted on his
guest's doing the same.  Finally, when the closing rites had been
accomplished, the cloth was removed, cigars were lit, and Mr.
Letterblair, leaning back in his chair and pushing the port westward,
said, spreading his back agreeably to the coal fire behind him:  "The
whole family are against a divorce.  And I think rightly."

Archer instantly felt himself on the other side of the argument.  "But
why, sir?  If there ever was a case--"

"Well--what's the use?  SHE'S here--he's there; the Atlantic's between
them.  She'll never get back a dollar more of her money than what he's
voluntarily returned to her: their damned heathen marriage settlements
take precious good care of that.  As things go over there, Olenski's
acted generously: he might have turned her out without a penny."

The young man knew this and was silent.

"I understand, though," Mr. Letterblair continued, "that she attaches
no importance to the money.  Therefore, as the family say, why not let
well enough alone?"

Archer had gone to the house an hour earlier in full agreement with Mr.
Letterblair's view; but put into words by this selfish, well-fed and
supremely indifferent old man it suddenly became the Pharisaic voice of
a society wholly absorbed in barricading itself against the unpleasant.

"I think that's for her to decide."

"H'm--have you considered the consequences if she decides for divorce?"

"You mean the threat in her husband's letter?  What weight would that
carry?  It's no more than the vague charge of an angry blackguard."

"Yes; but it might make some unpleasant talk if he really defends the
suit."

"Unpleasant--!" said Archer explosively.

Mr. Letterblair looked at him from under enquiring eyebrows, and the
young man, aware of the uselessness of trying to explain what was in
his mind, bowed acquiescently while his senior continued:  "Divorce is
always unpleasant."

"You agree with me?" Mr. Letterblair resumed, after a waiting silence.

"Naturally," said Archer.

"Well, then, I may count on you; the Mingotts may count on you; to use
your influence against the idea?"

Archer hesitated.  "I can't pledge myself till I've seen the Countess
Olenska," he said at length.

"Mr. Archer, I don't understand you.  Do you want to marry into a
family with a scandalous divorce-suit hanging over it?"

"I don't think that has anything to do with the case."

Mr. Letterblair put down his glass of port and fixed on his young
partner a cautious and apprehensive gaze.

Archer understood that he ran the risk of having his mandate withdrawn,
and for some obscure reason he disliked the prospect.  Now that the job
had been thrust on him he did not propose to relinquish it; and, to
guard against the possibility, he saw that he must reassure the
unimaginative old man who was the legal conscience of the Mingotts.

"You may be sure, sir, that I shan't commit myself till I've reported
to you; what I meant was that I'd rather not give an opinion till I've
heard what Madame Olenska has to say."

Mr. Letterblair nodded approvingly at an excess of caution worthy of
the best New York tradition, and the young man, glancing at his watch,
pleaded an engagement and took leave.

Newland goes to Madame Olenska's small, rented house "far down West 23rd Street," in a strange, Bohemian quarter. The Countess is not home, so Newland has ample time to look around her drawing room. The room is intimate and exotic, unlike the staid, conservative rooms of his life. He realizes that his and May's future drawing room will be nothing like this; it will be traditional and conservative. Eventually The Countess Olenska arrives with Julius Beaufort who leaves her at her door. She is house hunting because her family will not let her stay where she is even though the street is respectable. Newland counters that it is not "fashionable." Madame Olenska's candor is expressed when she tells Newland, "why not make one's own fashion?" Throughout their conversation she states candid opinions and he is shocked by her frankness. He tries to warn her that New York society does not like honesty, and she should be listening to her female relatives for advice. He would like to warn her to refrain from driving with Beaufort, but he prudently keeps silent. The Countess wins his sympathy when, sobbing, she explains how lonely she is. During her distress Newland forgets formalities and calls her "Ellen" twice, and then guiltily remembers May. The Duke of Astrey and Mrs. Struthers arrive, and she invites Madame Olenska and Newland to her salon on Sunday. Madame Olenska agrees, but Newland is silent. Leaving, Newland stops at a florist shop to order May's daily lilies of the valley. Seeing richly hued, yellow roses, he considers sending them to May; but instead, without his card, he sends them to the Countess. Newland's conflict continues. On a Sunday walk with May, he mentions sending roses to Ellen; May finds it odd that Ellen did not mention them. Again, he and May discuss the wedding date, and Newland is struck by May's lack of imagination or original thought. Their conversation leads him to regret the sameness of everything, including her expected reactions to his expected comments. The next afternoon Janey announces to Newland that Mrs. Archer is agitated because Madame Olenska has been seen at Mrs. Struthers' with the Duke and Julius Beaufort. In the midst of the argument, Henry van der Luyden arrives, explaining that he went to see the Countess Olenska to pass along some friendly advice. He says that the Duke does not realize "our little republican distinctions" and is leading Madame Olenska into mischief. Because the Duke was a guest in his house, van der Luyden feels he must explain the Duke's actions in an acceptable manner. Likewise, because Madame Olenska told Mr. van der Luyden that she would be grateful for his guidance, he has defended her to Sillerton Jackson. Newland works at the legal firm of Letterblair, Lamson, and Low. His boss, Mr. Letterblair, asks him to represent the Mingott family in dissuading the Countess Olenska from seeking a divorce. He gives Newland two letters to peruse, one from a French legal firm about finances and the other from the Count. A deadly quiet dinner with Mr. Letterblair emphasizes scandals that have brought down families and Newland's boss states three points: the Mingott family is against divorce, the Countess does not want the Count's money, and it would be wise to avoid a scandal that could only hurt the Countess and the Mingotts. Newland reluctantly agrees to take the case, but refuses to solidify his stance on the divorce until he has spoken to Madame Olenska. He sends her a note and she agrees to talk to him.

Newland is experiencing a conflict of feeling: He is caught in a matrimonial snare, yet he has always adhered to society's rules. With more bridal calls to make from "one tribal doorstep to another," Newland perceives himself "shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped." Should he have told May that he is calling on Madame Olenska? Should he be content with his in-laws' decision on the house he will occupy and with his wife's conventional interior decoration? Wharton highlights this conflict by placing him in Madame Olenska's drawing room, which is charmingly arranged with unconventional paintings. Even the smell of the artfully arranged flowers is exotic. This seems like freedom. Ellen contrasts her drawing room with the gloominess of the van der Luydens.' Why must everyone be exactly alike? Newland has not questioned that idea before. Madame Olenska is totally destroying the balance in Newland's world, and, to make matters worse, she brings out his protective instincts. When she confesses to her loneliness, he suggests that New Yorkers have opened their arms to her. However, she candidly tells him something he realizes but does not want to accept: New Yorkers do not seem to want to hear "the truth" and she feels very lonely among people who request that she pretend. Her distress causes him to drop his formalities, improperly take her hand, call her by her first name , and then guiltily remember his fiance. Newland is playing with fire. The vivid yellow roses are too strong for his insipid fiance but perfect for the Countess Olenska's free spirit. He places his card with the roses for Madame Olenska, but -- conscience stricken -- withdraws it. Two boxes of flowers, one white and one golden, are going to two women. With one he would live an orthodox life; with the other he would be free. One seems to lack imagination and original thoughts -- a person suitably symbolized by bland, white lilies-of-the-valley -- while the other represents the passion and imagination of yellow roses. Newland's conflict is far from over as evidenced during his conversation with May. His concern that she will stare "blankly at blankness" is certainly revealed by her inability to make any decisions herself. Even Newland's desire to travel is followed by May's thoughts of how she will explain this to her mother, who does not understand doing things "differently." When Newland tries to explain his new-found ideas about being free, she counters with the belief that his thought is "like people in novels . . . vulgar. . . ." Newland would like to think he could be unconventional, but May more truthfully realizes that they would both hate resisting social pressures. First May reminds Newland that he is at heart a conventional person, and then his dinner with Mr. Letterblair adds emphasis to that idea. Through this somber dinner, Wharton reminds the reader that Newland works in an atmosphere of old line New York legal retainers. While he enters the room desiring to rebel against convention, Mr. Letterblair convinces him that a divorce will not be wise for anyone. While Newland reconsiders his thought that Ellen should divorce, he finally agrees to represent the Countess because his concern for her protection outweighs his sense of prudence as an engaged man. He makes numerous excuses for her past, thinking that women in Europe might be drawn into affairs from sheer loneliness. What the Count's letter to the Countess alleges is never revealed, but Newland's reaction suggests that in it the Count hints or states that she had scandal to hide in her past. Newland never questions the Count's statements and his decision is partly based on his desire to protect her and her "pitiful figure." Newland's motive is also based on his own affair with Mrs. Thorley Rushworth. The double standard in sexual liaisons is foremost in Newland's mind. As his mother would say of men's affairs, "such things happened." It was "foolish of the man" but "always criminal of the woman." This double standard is passed down from aunts, mothers, and other female relatives. There are "women we love and respect" and so we marry them, and "women we enjoy and pity" with whom we have affairs. Newland's continuing conflict is between considering Ellen as a person who should be respected and free, or thinking of her as the woman with whom he desires an affair. At this point he decides he will speak with her and save her from the censure of New York society that would be brought on by a divorce for any reason. Glossary vitrines a glass-paneled cabinet or glass display case for art objects, curios, etc. in extremis  at the point of death. labyrinth a complicated, perplexing arrangement, course of affairs, or the like. denouement outcome, resolution. lapis lazuli an azure-blue, opaque semiprecious stone; a mixture of various minerals. inanition emptiness; exhaustion; lack of strength or spirit. importunate troublesome; annoyingly persistent. clandestine kept secret or hidden, especially for some illicit purpose; surreptitious; furtive. sedulously persistently and steadily; diligently.


Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner
calls, though derided in Archer's set, still generally prevailed.  As
the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place, the long
thoroughfare was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before
the Reggie Chiverses' (where there was a dinner for the Duke), and the
occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and muffler
ascending a brownstone doorstep and disappearing into a gas-lit hall.
Thus, as Archer crossed Washington Square, he remarked that old Mr. du
Lac was calling on his cousins the Dagonets, and turning down the
corner of West Tenth Street he saw Mr. Skipworth, of his own firm,
obviously bound on a visit to the Miss Lannings.  A little farther up
Fifth Avenue, Beaufort appeared on his doorstep, darkly projected
against a blaze of light, descended to his private brougham, and rolled
away to a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination.  It was
not an Opera night, and no one was giving a party, so that Beaufort's
outing was undoubtedly of a clandestine nature.  Archer connected it in
his mind with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in which
beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had recently appeared, and
before whose newly painted door the canary-coloured brougham of Miss
Fanny Ring was frequently seen to wait.

Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which composed Mrs. Archer's
world lay the almost unmapped quarter inhabited by artists, musicians
and "people who wrote."  These scattered fragments of humanity had
never shown any desire to be amalgamated with the social structure.  In
spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite
respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves.  Medora Manson,
in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had
soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of
Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who
imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,
and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the
magazine editors and musical and literary critics.

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these
persons.  They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one
didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds.
Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs.
Archer was always at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable
and cultivated society had been when it included such figures as
Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit
Fay." The most celebrated authors of that generation had been
"gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had
gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair,
their intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York
criterion inapplicable to them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody
between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had
carriages.  It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't
tell, and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and
almost parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have
bridged the abyss; but she had never opened a book or looked at a
picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala
nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.
Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in
bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged
footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability.  Moreover, he was as
illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as
the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough
to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could
remember, and had accepted them as part of the structure of his
universe.  He knew that there were societies where painters and poets
and novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were as sought
after as Dukes; he had often pictured to himself what it would have
been to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of
Merimee (whose "Lettres a une Inconnue" was one of his inseparables),
of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris.  But such things were
inconceivable in New York, and unsettling to think of.  Archer knew
most of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he met
them at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that
were beginning to come into existence.  He enjoyed them there, and was
bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid
and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and
even after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away
with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that
the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where
they would naturally merge.

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the
Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted
mysterious joys.  He remembered with what amusement she had told him
that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in
a "Bohemian" quarter given over to "people who wrote."  It was not the
peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped
her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising.

She herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her
drawing-room (a part of the house in which books were usually supposed
to be "out of place"), though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted
Archer's interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,
Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers.  Ruminating on these things as he
approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in
which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into
conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be
of use in her present difficulty.

Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously.  On the bench in the
hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk with a
gold J. B. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no
mistaking the fact that these costly articles were the property of
Julius Beaufort.

Archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling a word on his
card and going away; then he remembered that in writing to Madame
Olenska he had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that he
wished to see her privately.  He had therefore no one but himself to
blame if she had opened her doors to other visitors; and he entered the
drawing-room with the dogged determination to make Beaufort feel
himself in the way, and to outstay him.

The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf, which was draped with
an old embroidery held in place by brass candelabra containing church
candles of yellowish wax.  He had thrust his chest out, supporting his
shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on one large
patent-leather foot.  As Archer entered he was smiling and looking down
on his hostess, who sat on a sofa placed at right angles to the
chimney.  A table banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and
against the orchids and azaleas which the young man recognised as
tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses, Madame Olenska sat
half-reclined, her head propped on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving
the arm bare to the elbow.

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings to wear what were
called "simple dinner dresses": a close-fitting armour of whale-boned
silk, slightly open in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the
crack, and tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough wrist to
show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet band.  But Madame Olenska,
heedless of tradition, was attired in a long robe of red velvet
bordered about the chin and down the front with glossy black fur.
Archer remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait by the
new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures were the sensation of the
Salon, in which the lady wore one of these bold sheath-like robes with
her chin nestling in fur.  There was something perverse and provocative
in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated drawing-room, and
in the combination of a muffled throat and bare arms; but the effect
was undeniably pleasing.

"Lord love us--three whole days at Skuytercliff!" Beaufort was saying
in his loud sneering voice as Archer entered.  "You'd better take all
your furs, and a hot-water-bottle."

"Why?  Is the house so cold?" she asked, holding out her left hand to
Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting that she expected him to kiss
it.

"No; but the missus is," said Beaufort, nodding carelessly to the young
man.

"But I thought her so kind.  She came herself to invite me. Granny says
I must certainly go."

"Granny would, of course.  And I say it's a shame you're going to miss
the little oyster supper I'd planned for you at Delmonico's next
Sunday, with Campanini and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people."

She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.

"Ah--that does tempt me!  Except the other evening at Mrs. Struthers's
I've not met a single artist since I've been here."

"What kind of artists?  I know one or two painters, very good fellows,
that I could bring to see you if you'd allow me," said Archer boldly.

"Painters?  Are there painters in New York?" asked Beaufort, in a tone
implying that there could be none since he did not buy their pictures;
and Madame Olenska said to Archer, with her grave smile:  "That would
be charming.  But I was really thinking of dramatic artists, singers,
actors, musicians.  My husband's house was always full of them."

She said the words "my husband" as if no sinister associations were
connected with them, and in a tone that seemed almost to sigh over the
lost delights of her married life.  Archer looked at her perplexedly,
wondering if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her to
touch so easily on the past at the very moment when she was risking her
reputation in order to break with it.

"I do think," she went on, addressing both men, "that the imprevu adds
to one's enjoyment.  It's perhaps a mistake to see the same people
every day."

"It's confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying of dullness,"
Beaufort grumbled.  "And when I try to liven it up for you, you go back
on me.  Come--think better of it!  Sunday is your last chance, for
Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and I've a
private room, and a Steinway, and they'll sing all night for me."

"How delicious!  May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow
morning?"

She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice.
Beaufort evidently felt it, and being unused to dismissals, stood
staring at her with an obstinate line between his eyes.

"Why not now?"

"It's too serious a question to decide at this late hour."

"Do you call it late?"

She returned his glance coolly.  "Yes; because I have still to talk
business with Mr. Archer for a little while."

"Ah," Beaufort snapped.  There was no appeal from her tone, and with a
slight shrug he recovered his composure, took her hand, which he kissed
with a practised air, and calling out from the threshold:  "I say,
Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop in town of course
you're included in the supper," left the room with his heavy important
step.

For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair must have told her of
his coming; but the irrelevance of her next remark made him change his
mind.

"You know painters, then?  You live in their milieu?" she asked, her
eyes full of interest.

"Oh, not exactly.  I don't know that the arts have a milieu here, any
of them; they're more like a very thinly settled outskirt."

"But you care for such things?"

"Immensely.  When I'm in Paris or London I never miss an exhibition.  I
try to keep up."

She looked down at the tip of the little satin boot that peeped from
her long draperies.

"I used to care immensely too: my life was full of such things.  But
now I want to try not to."

"You want to try not to?"

"Yes: I want to cast off all my old life, to become just like everybody
else here."

Archer reddened.  "You'll never be like everybody else," he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little.  "Ah, don't say that.  If
you knew how I hate to be different!"

Her face had grown as sombre as a tragic mask.  She leaned forward,
clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into
remote dark distances.

"I want to get away from it all," she insisted.

He waited a moment and cleared his throat.  "I know.  Mr. Letterblair
has told me."

"Ah?"

"That's the reason I've come.  He asked me to--you see I'm in the firm."

She looked slightly surprised, and then her eyes brightened.  "You mean
you can manage it for me?  I can talk to you instead of Mr.
Letterblair?  Oh, that will be so much easier!"

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew with his
self-satisfaction.  He perceived that she had spoken of business to
Beaufort simply to get rid of him; and to have routed Beaufort was
something of a triumph.

"I am here to talk about it," he repeated.

She sat silent, her head still propped by the arm that rested on the
back of the sofa.  Her face looked pale and extinguished, as if dimmed
by the rich red of her dress.  She struck Archer, of a sudden, as a
pathetic and even pitiful figure.

"Now we're coming to hard facts," he thought, conscious in himself of
the same instinctive recoil that he had so often criticised in his
mother and her contemporaries.  How little practice he had had in
dealing with unusual situations!  Their very vocabulary was unfamiliar
to him, and seemed to belong to fiction and the stage.  In face of what
was coming he felt as awkward and embarrassed as a boy.

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence:  "I
want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past."

"I understand that."

Her face warmed.  "Then you'll help me?"

"First--" he hesitated--"perhaps I ought to know a little more."

She seemed surprised.  "You know about my husband--my life with him?"

He made a sign of assent.

"Well--then--what more is there?  In this country are such things
tolerated?  I'm a Protestant--our church does not forbid divorce in
such cases."

"Certainly not."

They were both silent again, and Archer felt the spectre of Count
Olenski's letter grimacing hideously between them.  The letter filled
only half a page, and was just what he had described it to be in
speaking of it to Mr. Letterblair: the vague charge of an angry
blackguard.  But how much truth was behind it?  Only Count Olenski's
wife could tell.

"I've looked through the papers you gave to Mr. Letterblair," he said
at length.

"Well--can there be anything more abominable?"

"No."

She changed her position slightly, screening her eyes with her lifted
hand.

"Of course you know," Archer continued, "that if your husband chooses
to fight the case--as he threatens to--"

"Yes--?"

"He can say things--things that might be unpl--might be disagreeable to
you: say them publicly, so that they would get about, and harm you even
if--"

"If--?"

"I mean: no matter how unfounded they were."

She paused for a long interval; so long that, not wishing to keep his
eyes on her shaded face, he had time to imprint on his mind the exact
shape of her other hand, the one on her knee, and every detail of the
three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers; among which, he noticed, a
wedding ring did not appear.

"What harm could such accusations, even if he made them publicly, do me
here?"

It was on his lips to exclaim:  "My poor child--far more harm than
anywhere else!"  Instead, he answered, in a voice that sounded in his
ears like Mr. Letterblair's: "New York society is a very small world
compared with the one you've lived in.  And it's ruled, in spite of
appearances, by a few people with--well, rather old-fashioned ideas."

She said nothing, and he continued:  "Our ideas about marriage and
divorce are particularly old-fashioned.  Our legislation favours
divorce--our social customs don't."

"Never?"

"Well--not if the woman, however injured, however irreproachable, has
appearances in the least degree against her, has exposed herself by any
unconventional action to--to offensive insinuations--"

She drooped her head a little lower, and he waited again, intensely
hoping for a flash of indignation, or at least a brief cry of denial.
None came.

A little travelling clock ticked purringly at her elbow, and a log
broke in two and sent up a shower of sparks.  The whole hushed and
brooding room seemed to be waiting silently with Archer.

"Yes," she murmured at length, "that's what my family tell me."

He winced a little.  "It's not unnatural--"

"OUR family," she corrected herself; and Archer coloured.  "For you'll
be my cousin soon," she continued gently.

"I hope so."

"And you take their view?"

He stood up at this, wandered across the room, stared with void eyes at
one of the pictures against the old red damask, and came back
irresolutely to her side.  How could he say:  "Yes, if what your
husband hints is true, or if you've no way of disproving it?"

"Sincerely--" she interjected, as he was about to speak.

He looked down into the fire.  "Sincerely, then--what should you gain
that would compensate for the possibility--the certainty--of a lot of
beastly talk?"

"But my freedom--is that nothing?"

It flashed across him at that instant that the charge in the letter was
true, and that she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt.  How was he
to tell her that, if she really cherished such a plan, the laws of the
State were inexorably opposed to it?  The mere suspicion that the
thought was in her mind made him feel harshly and impatiently toward
her.  "But aren't you as free as air as it is?" he returned.  "Who can
touch you?  Mr. Letterblair tells me the financial question has been
settled--"

"Oh, yes," she said indifferently.

"Well, then: is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely
disagreeable and painful?  Think of the newspapers--their vileness!
It's all stupid and narrow and unjust--but one can't make over society."

"No," she acquiesced; and her tone was so faint and desolate that he
felt a sudden remorse for his own hard thoughts.

"The individual, in such cases, is nearly always sacrificed to what is
supposed to be the collective interest: people cling to any convention
that keeps the family together--protects the children, if there are
any," he rambled on, pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his
lips in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her
silence seemed to have laid bare.  Since she would not or could not say
the one word that would have cleared the air, his wish was not to let
her feel that he was trying to probe into her secret.  Better keep on
the surface, in the prudent old New York way, than risk uncovering a
wound he could not heal.

"It's my business, you know," he went on, "to help you to see these
things as the people who are fondest of you see them.  The Mingotts,
the Wellands, the van der Luydens, all your friends and relations: if I
didn't show you honestly how they judge such questions, it wouldn't be
fair of me, would it?"  He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her
in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence.

She said slowly:  "No; it wouldn't be fair."

The fire had crumbled down to greyness, and one of the lamps made a
gurgling appeal for attention.  Madame Olenska rose, wound it up and
returned to the fire, but without resuming her seat.

Her remaining on her feet seemed to signify that there was nothing more
for either of them to say, and Archer stood up also.

"Very well; I will do what you wish," she said abruptly.  The blood
rushed to his forehead; and, taken aback by the suddenness of her
surrender, he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.

"I--I do want to help you," he said.

"You do help me.  Good night, my cousin."

He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless.
She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat
under the faint gas-light of the hall, and plunged out into the winter
night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.

The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role
and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.  The popularity of the
admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always
packed the house.  In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in
the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed
sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as
the galleries did.

There was one episode, in particular, that held the house from floor to
ceiling.  It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost
monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and
turned to go.  The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and
looking down into the fire, wore a gray cashmere dress without
fashionable loopings or trimmings, moulded to her tall figure and
flowing in long lines about her feet.  Around her neck was a narrow
black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her back.

When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms against the
mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her hands.  On the threshold he
paused to look at her; then he stole back, lifted one of the ends of
velvet ribbon, kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or
changing her attitude.  And on this silent parting the curtain fell.

It was always for the sake of that particular scene that Newland Archer
went to see "The Shaughraun." He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada
Dyas as fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in
Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London; in its reticence, its
dumb sorrow, it moved him more than the most famous histrionic
outpourings.

On the evening in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy
by reminding him--he could not have said why--of his leave-taking from
Madame Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.

It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the
two situations as between the appearance of the persons concerned.
Newland Archer could not pretend to anything approaching the young
English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas was a tall
red-haired woman of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly
face was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance.  Nor were
Archer and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;
they were client and lawyer separating after a talk which had given the
lawyer the worst possible impression of the client's case.  Wherein,
then, lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart beat with a
kind of retrospective excitement?  It seemed to be in Madame Olenska's
mysterious faculty of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities
outside the daily run of experience.  She had hardly ever said a word
to him to produce this impression, but it was a part of her, either a
projection of her mysterious and outlandish background or of something
inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself.  Archer had
always been inclined to think that chance and circumstance played a
small part in shaping people's lots compared with their innate tendency
to have things happen to them.  This tendency he had felt from the
first in Madame Olenska.  The quiet, almost passive young woman struck
him as exactly the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen,
no matter how much she shrank from them and went out of her way to
avoid them.  The exciting fact was her having lived in an atmosphere so
thick with drama that her own tendency to provoke it had apparently
passed unperceived.  It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in
her that gave him the sense of her having been plucked out of a very
maelstrom: the things she took for granted gave the measure of those
she had rebelled against.

Archer had left her with the conviction that Count Olenski's accusation
was not unfounded.  The mysterious person who figured in his wife's
past as "the secretary" had probably not been unrewarded for his share
in her escape.  The conditions from which she had fled were
intolerable, past speaking of, past believing: she was young, she was
frightened, she was desperate--what more natural than that she should
be grateful to her rescuer?  The pity was that her gratitude put her,
in the law's eyes and the world's, on a par with her abominable
husband.  Archer had made her understand this, as he was bound to do;
he had also made her understand that simplehearted kindly New York, on
whose larger charity she had apparently counted, was precisely the
place where she could least hope for indulgence.

To have to make this fact plain to her--and to witness her resigned
acceptance of it--had been intolerably painful to him.  He felt himself
drawn to her by obscure feelings of jealousy and pity, as if her
dumbly-confessed error had put her at his mercy, humbling yet endearing
her.  He was glad it was to him she had revealed her secret, rather
than to the cold scrutiny of Mr. Letterblair, or the embarrassed gaze
of her family.  He immediately took it upon himself to assure them both
that she had given up her idea of seeking a divorce, basing her
decision on the fact that she had understood the uselessness of the
proceeding; and with infinite relief they had all turned their eyes
from the "unpleasantness" she had spared them.

"I was sure Newland would manage it," Mrs. Welland had said proudly of
her future son-in-law; and old Mrs. Mingott, who had summoned him for a
confidential interview, had congratulated him on his cleverness, and
added impatiently:  "Silly goose!  I told her myself what nonsense it
was.  Wanting to pass herself off as Ellen Mingott and an old maid,
when she has the luck to be a married woman and a Countess!"

These incidents had made the memory of his last talk with Madame
Olenska so vivid to the young man that as the curtain fell on the
parting of the two actors his eyes filled with tears, and he stood up
to leave the theatre.

In doing so, he turned to the side of the house behind him, and saw the
lady of whom he was thinking seated in a box with the Beauforts,
Lawrence Lefferts and one or two other men.  He had not spoken with her
alone since their evening together, and had tried to avoid being with
her in company; but now their eyes met, and as Mrs. Beaufort recognised
him at the same time, and made her languid little gesture of
invitation, it was impossible not to go into the box.

Beaufort and Lefferts made way for him, and after a few words with Mrs.
Beaufort, who always preferred to look beautiful and not have to talk,
Archer seated himself behind Madame Olenska.  There was no one else in
the box but Mr. Sillerton Jackson, who was telling Mrs. Beaufort in a
confidential undertone about Mrs. Lemuel Struthers's last Sunday
reception (where some people reported that there had been dancing).
Under cover of this circumstantial narrative, to which Mrs. Beaufort
listened with her perfect smile, and her head at just the right angle
to be seen in profile from the stalls, Madame Olenska turned and spoke
in a low voice.

"Do you think," she asked, glancing toward the stage, "he will send her
a bunch of yellow roses tomorrow morning?"

Archer reddened, and his heart gave a leap of surprise.  He had called
only twice on Madame Olenska, and each time he had sent her a box of
yellow roses, and each time without a card.  She had never before made
any allusion to the flowers, and he supposed she had never thought of
him as the sender.  Now her sudden recognition of the gift, and her
associating it with the tender leave-taking on the stage, filled him
with an agitated pleasure.

"I was thinking of that too--I was going to leave the theatre in order
to take the picture away with me," he said.

To his surprise her colour rose, reluctantly and duskily.  She looked
down at the mother-of-pearl opera-glass in her smoothly gloved hands,
and said, after a pause: "What do you do while May is away?"

"I stick to my work," he answered, faintly annoyed by the question.

In obedience to a long-established habit, the Wellands had left the
previous week for St. Augustine, where, out of regard for the supposed
susceptibility of Mr. Welland's bronchial tubes, they always spent the
latter part of the winter.  Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man, with
no opinions but with many habits.  With these habits none might
interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should
always go with him on his annual journey to the south.  To preserve an
unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not
have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for
his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.

As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland
was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife
and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were
both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always
joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.

It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's
accompanying her father.  The reputation of the Mingotts' family
physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr.
Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was
therefore inflexible.  Originally, it had been intended that May's
engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and
the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected to
alter Mr. Welland's plans.  Archer would have liked to join the
travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his
betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions.  Little
arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted
of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for a
holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the
resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal
constituents of married life.

He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered
lids.  "I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said
abruptly.

"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject
at such a moment.

"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly;
"but sometimes life is difficult ...  perplexing..."

"I know."

"And I wanted to tell you that I DO feel you were right; and that I'm
grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her
eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke
in on them.

Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.

Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in which,
with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to Ellen" in
their absence.  "She likes you and admires you so much--and you know,
though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and unhappy.  I
don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott either;
they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society than she
is.  And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her, though
the family won't admit it.  I think she's been used to lots of things
we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and
celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.
Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and
clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York
who can talk to her about what she really cares for."

His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter!  But he had not
meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not
care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame
Olenska's champion.  He had an idea that she knew how to take care of
herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined.  She had
Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a
protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among
them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance.  Yet he never
saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,
May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination.  Ellen
Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.

On the way to Countess Olenska's house, Newland sees Beaufort's carriage leaving for some dark assignation. He considers, as he walks, the many differences between his mother's world of the leisure class and the world occupied by artists and creative people. But when he reaches Countess Olenska's house, he finds Beaufort there. Angry, Newland feels once again like her protector. The Countess dismisses Beaufort, leaving Newland triumphant. Newland tells Madame Olenska that he is there to discuss business with her. He stresses that New Yorkers have "old fashioned ideas," and while it might be legal to divorce, it is not accepted socially. Further, the Count might bring up scandalous accusations and, true or not, she will be ruined. Here he pauses, but the Countess is silent, leading Newland to believe there might be some truth in the Count's allegations. He explains that she is financially provided for and free, so why divorce simply to have what she already has? She asks if he agrees with the family and when he does, she decides to drop the divorce request. Ten days later, Newland is in Wallack's theatre and he feels an unexplainable sadness after watching a sad scene of lovers parting in "The Shaughraun." May, in Florida with her family, has asked him to "be kind to Ellen." Ellen, too, is at the theatre. Newland joins her and the Countess asks him if the character in the play will send his lover yellow roses. Newland blushes; he is becoming entranced with Ellen Olenska as a person "to whom things were bound to happen."

Through Newland's thoughts, Wharton points out the huge differences between the social conduct of Europe and America. The writers, musicians, and artists who live in New York City's Bohemian quarter, while often odd or eccentric, are mainly respectable. Mrs. Archer, however, views them as disreputable and living in poverty. Newland sees Madame Olenska's society in Europe as a place where creative people and scientific thinkers are welcome. While he is drawn to writers like Ned Winsett who seem to live in a world of exciting ideas, he is also reminded of the restrictions on his own life. Beaufort's friendship with the Countess Olenska also reflects the disparity between American and European values. When Newland goes to her home and finds Beaufort there, she is dressed in a red robe with black fur, which Newland considers a sensual and improper attire for a virtuous American lady. It is, however, the latest thing in Europe. While Beaufort and the Countess might be at home in Europe, Newland most assuredly would not be. Divorce is discussed at length in the context of social values. Newland explains to the Countess that the collective interest of society outweighs the needs of the individual. In New York, people believe the institution of the family must be protected. Ellen Olenska will be sacrificed if she divorces. The irony of Newland's mission is revealed as his feelings for Ellen increase in spite of his belief that he must be loyal to the family. He, too, is an individual being sacrificed to society's collective interest: its desire to replicate itself by proper marriages between correct people. Glossary parvenu  nouveau riche; a person who has suddenly acquired wealth or power. dissimulation pretense; hypocrisy. imprevu unforeseen. milieu environment; esp., social or cultural setting. blackguard a person who uses abusive language; a scoundrel or villain. hackneyed made trite by overuse. histrionic overacted or overacting; theatrical; artificial; affected.