The Age of Innocence quotes

… same means had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to democratic principles) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of one’s own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy.

It was one of the great livery-stableman’s most masterly intuitions to have discovered that Americans want to get away from amusement even more quickly than they want to get to it.

When Newland Archer opened the door at the back of the club box the curtain had just gone up on the garden scene.

The second reason for his delay was a personal one.

He had dawdled over his cigar because he was at heart a dilettante, and thinking over a pleasure to come often gave him a subtler satisfaction than its realisation.

This was especially the case when the pleasure was a delicate one, as his pleasures mostly were;

In matters intellectual and artistic Newland Archer felt himself distinctly the superior of these chosen specimens of old New York gentility; he had probably read more, thought more, and even seen a good deal more of the world, than any other man of the number.

Singly they betrayed their inferiority; but grouped together they represented “New York,” and the habit of masculine solidarity made him accept their doctrine on all the issues called moral.

He instinctively felt that in this respect it would be troublesome—and also rather bad form—to strike out for himself.

“

What’s the use of two good cooks in one family, now that I’ve married the girls and can’t eat sauces?

”

… sat gracefully in her corner of the box, her eyes fixed on the stage, and revealing, as she leaned forward, a little more shoulder and bosom than New York was accustomed to seeing, at least in ladies who had reasons for wishing to pass unnoticed.

Few things seemed to Newland Archer more awful than an offence against “Taste,” that far-off divinity of whom “Form” was the mere visible representative and vicegerent.

Madame Olenska’s pale and serious face appealed to his fancy as suited to the occasion and to her unhappy situation; but the way her dress (which had no tucker) sloped away from her thin shoulders shocked and troubled him.

Nothing could be in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat stiffly: “Yes, you have been away a very long time.”

“Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,” she said, “that I’m sure I’m dead and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;”

which, for reasons he could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more disrespectful way of describing New York society.

“My wife’s gloxinias are a marvel, aren’t they? I believe she gets them out from Kew.”

Mr. Beaufort’s secret, people were agreed, was the way he carried things off.

It was all very well to whisper that he had been “helped” to leave England by the international banking-house in which he had been employed;

“Oh, well—” said Archer with happy indifference.

Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they had both been brought up.

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

Meanwhile, as everyone she cared to see came to her (and she could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon.

She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small …

“We must give them time to get to know each other a little better, mamma,” Mrs. Welland interposed, with the proper affectation of reluctance; to which the ancestress rejoined: “

Know each other? Fiddlesticks! Everybody in New York has always known everybody.

Let the young man have his way, my dear; don’t wait till the bubble’s off the wine. Marry them before Lent; I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and I want to give the wedding-breakfast.”

“It’s a pity the Beauforts asked her,” Mrs. Archer said gently. “But then Regina always does what he tells her; and Beaufort—”

“Certain nuances escape Beaufort,” said Mr. Jackson,

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

They say his advertiser used the girl’s head for the shoe-polish posters; her hair’s intensely black, you know—the Egyptian style. Anyhow, he—eventually—married her.”

There were volumes of innuendo in the way the “eventually” was spaced, and each syllable given its due stress.

“Oh, well—at the pass we’ve come to nowadays, it doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Archer indifferently. The ladies were not really interested in Mrs. Struthers just then; the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh and too absorbing to them. Indeed, Mrs.

Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards.

In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs

; as when Mrs.

The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance.

She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against;

and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called “the facts of life.”

Her fair hair, which had faded without turning grey, was still parted in flat overlapping points on her forehead, and the straight nose that divided her pale blue eyes was only a little more pinched about the nostrils than when the portrait had been painted.

She always, indeed, struck Newland Archer as having been rather gruesomely preserved in the airless atmosphere of a perfectly irreproachable existence, as bodies caught in glaciers keep for years a rosy life-in-death.

Like all his family, he esteemed and admired Mrs. van der Luyden;

A footman appeared, to whom she gravely added: “If Mr. van der Luyden has finished reading the newspaper, please ask him to be kind enough to come.”

She said “reading the newspaper” in the tone in which a Minister’s wife might have said: “Presiding at a Cabinet meeting”

—not from any arrogance of mind, but because the habit of a lifetime, and the attitude of her friends and relations, had led her to consider Mr. van der Luyden’s least gesture as having an almost sacerdotal importance.

The Countess Olenska was the only young woman at the dinner; yet, as Archer scanned the smooth plump elderly faces between their diamond necklaces and towering ostrich feathers, they struck him as curiously immature compared with hers.

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

The Duke of St. Austrey, who sat at his hostess’s right, was naturally the chief figure of the evening. But if the Countess Olenska was less conspicuous than had been hoped, the Duke was almost invisible.

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;

“Isn’t that perhaps 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.

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.

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:

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.

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 teakettle. It was burnt into his consciousness that he had called her “Ellen”—called her so twice; and that she had not noticed it.

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.

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.”

… 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.

“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.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little. “

Ah, don’t say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!

”

After a pause Madame Olenska broke out with unexpected vehemence: “

I want to be free; I want to wipe out all the past.

”

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 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.

Winsett was not a journalist by choice.

He was a pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had no need of letters

;

the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them. But you’re in a pitiful little minority: you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience.

You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: The Portrait of a Gentleman.

You’ll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate … God! If I could emigrate …”

Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no more do that than one could roll up one’s sleeves and go down into the muck.

A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained.

But you couldn’t make a man like Winsett see that;

She shrugged again. “

Does anything ever happen in heaven?

”

Finally she said: “I will tell you—but where, where, where? One can’t be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house, with all the doors wide open, and always a servant bringing tea, or a log for the fire, or the newspaper!

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self? You’re so shy, and yet you’re so public.

I always feel as if I were in the convent again—or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.”

Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by one’s self? You’re so shy, and yet you’re so public.

I always feel as if I were in the convent again⁠—or on the stage, before a dreadfully polite audience that never applauds.

”

“Yes.” She paused. “

But I can’t feel unhappy when you’re here.

”

“No; I know.

But I’m improvident: I live in the moment when I’m happy.

”

Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly.

His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence.

Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.

The next two or three days dragged by heavily.

The taste of the usual was like cinders in his mouth, and there were moments when he felt as if he were being buried alive under his future.

He heard nothing of the Countess Olenska, or of the perfect little house, and though he met Beaufort at the club they merely nodded at each other across the whist-tables.

Mrs. Welland smiled compassionately. “That is just like the extraordinary things that foreigners invent about us.

They think we dine at two o’clock and countenance divorce!

That is why it seems to me so foolish to entertain them when they come to New York. They accept our hospitality, and then they go home and repeat the same stupid stories.”

Traces still lingered on them of a fresh beauty like her daughter’s; and he asked himself if May’s face was doomed to thicken into the same middle-aged image of invincible innocence.

Ah, no, he did not want May to have that kind of innocence, the innocence that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience!

“I verily believe,” Mrs. Welland continued, “that if the horrible business had come out in the newspapers it would have been my husband’s deathblow. I don’t know any of the details;

“What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?” Madame Olenska cried as she came into the room.

She was dressed as if for a ball. Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams; and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a roomful of rivals.

“We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise you with,” Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly to the flowers.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other side of the hearth. “

Ah, don’t make love to me! Too many people have done that

,” she said, frowning.

“Ah, don’t let us undo what you’ve done!” she cried. “I can’t go back now to that other way of thinking.

I can’t love you unless I give you up.

”

She smiled a little under her wet lashes. “I shan’t be lonely now. I was lonely; I was afraid.

But the emptiness and the darkness are gone; when I turn back into myself now I’m like a child going at night into a room where there’s always a light.

”

“

Nothing’s the matter, except that I’m going to be married in a month.

”

Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts’s keen eyes would discover in the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had once thought such questions important.

The things that had filled his days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of medieval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever understood.

A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents should be “shown” had darkened the last hours before the wedding;

And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one’s own; or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there?

The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism—two different forms of the same self-abdication.” He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. “Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face:

The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.

The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.

The idea that he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if they had been children playing in a graveyard.

He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson fluttered out of the drawing-room window.

“Gad,” Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, “not one of the lot holds the bow as she does”; and Beaufort retorted: “

Yes; but that’s the only kind of target she’ll ever hit.

”

The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart.

What if “niceness” carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness?

As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull’s-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain.

“

Well⁠—watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don’t think people happier in hell.

”

“Newland never seems to look ahead,” Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely: “

No; but you see it doesn’t matter, because when there’s nothing particular to do he reads a book.

”

“Nor you either—if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing.

It’s a hundred years since we’ve met⁠—it may be another hundred before we meet again.

”

“To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition—somebody else’s tradition—that I see among our own friends.

It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.

” She smiled across the table. “Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”

But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition—somebody else’s tradition—that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” She smiled across the table. “

Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?

”

“

Yes: for I’m of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I’m the man who married one woman because another one told him to.

”

“I know: our American stations must surprise you.

When you ask for a porter they give you chewing-gum.

But if you’ll come along I’ll extricate you; and you must really lunch with me, you know.”

“It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving,” Miss Jackson opined; and her hostess drily rejoined: “

Oh, he means us to give thanks for what’s left.

”

“Of course, Newland, I know you let dear May go to Mrs. Struthers’s Sunday evenings—” she began; and May interposed gaily: “Oh, you know, everybody goes to Mrs. Struthers’s now; and she was invited to Granny’s last reception.”

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining that they had taken place in a preceding age.

There was always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had tasted of Mrs.

Outside it, in the scene of his actual life, he moved with a growing sense of unreality and insufficiency, blundering against familiar prejudices and traditional points of view as an absentminded man goes on bumping into the furniture of his own room.

Absent⁠—that was what he was: so absent from everything most densely real and near to those about him that it sometimes startled him to find they still imagined he was there.

He became aware that Mr. Jackson was clearing his throat preparatory to farther revelations.

Welland. She bent over to lower the wick, and as the light struck up on her white shoulders and the clear curves of her face he thought: “

How young she is! For what endless years this life will have to go on!

”

“

They smell less if one blows them out

,” she explained, with her bright housekeeping air. On the threshold she turned and paused for his kiss.

“And when she said: ‘But my name, Auntie—my name’s Regina Dallas,’ I said: ‘

It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it’s got to stay Beaufort now that he’s covered you with shame.

’ ”

“

If people of my age will eat chicken-salad in the evening what are they to expect?

” she enquired; and, the doctor having opportunely modified her dietary, the stroke was transformed into an attack of indigestion. But in spite of her firm tone old Catherine did not wholly recover her former attitude toward life.

“No: but my going is,” he answered, cursing the unnecessary explanations that he had given when he had announced his intention of going to Washington, and wondering where he had read that clever liars give details, but that the cleverest do not.

It did not hurt him half as much to tell May an untruth as to see her trying to pretend that she had not detected him.

“I’m not going till later on: luckily for the convenience of your family,” he continued, taking base refuge in sarcasm.

“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so.

Each time you happen to me all over again.

”

“

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

”

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: “

I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo⁠—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.

”

“Well, she opened my eyes too; it’s a delusion to say that she blinds people.

What she does is just the contrary⁠—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re never again in the blessed darkness.

Isn’t there a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it’s a miserable little country!”

“For us? But there’s no us in that sense!

We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other.

Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.”

He had called back a cheery “Yes!” and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise. Now he was smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage.

He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the temperature of passion yet with all its exactions.

If May had spoken out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile.

… brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he would always know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an emotion.

She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past.

Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland. He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once she raised her head.

She had spent her poetry and romance on their short courting: the function was exhausted because the need was past.

Now she was simply ripening into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.

He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and at once she raised her head.

“

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

”

He laughed, and she continued: “Was it because you told her so that she had to put you out on the way?

In my youth young men didn’t desert pretty women unless they were made to!

” She gave another chuckle, and interrupted it to say almost querulously: “It’s a pity she didn’t marry you; I always told her so. It would have spared me all this worry. But who ever thought of sparing their grandmother worry?”

In my youth young men didn’t desert pretty women unless they were made to!” She gave another chuckle, and interrupted it to say almost querulously: “It’s a pity she didn’t marry you; I always told her so. It would have spared me all this worry.

But who ever thought of sparing their grandmother worry?

”

“Then we’re safe!” she sighed; and smiling on him with all her ancient cunning she added, as she settled her head among the cushions: “

I always knew you’d back us up, because they never quote you when they talk about its being her duty to go home.

”

It was, in fact, that which, with a secret fatuity, he had watched Mrs. Thorley Rushworth play toward a fond and unperceiving husband: a smiling, bantering, humouring, watchful and incessant lie.

A lie by day, a lie by night, a lie in every touch and every look; a lie in every caress and every quarrel; a lie in every word and in every silence.

It was easier, and less dastardly on the whole, for a wife to play such a part toward her husband. A woman’s standard of truthfulness was tacitly held to be lower: she was the subject creature, and versed in the arts of the enslaved.

But in Archer’s little world no one laughed at a wife deceived, and a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage.

In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once.

Archer had always shared this view: in his heart he thought Lefferts despicable. But to love Ellen Olenska was not to become a man like Lefferts: for the first time Archer found himself face to face with the dread argument of the individual case.

“This was what had to be, then … this was what had to be,” he kept repeating to himself, as if he hung in the clutch of doom.

What he had dreamed of had been so different that there was a mortal chill in his rapture.

The door opened and May came in.

At any rate that’s what Augusta and my daughters-in-law think. And I don’t know that I altogether blame her. Olenski’s a finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it is in Fifth Avenue.

Not that the family would admit that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in.

And poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband. She held out as firmly as ever against that. So she’s to settle down in Paris with that fool Medora. … Well, Paris is Paris;

… now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed camp.

“Has he got any?” cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears; and while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old gentleman twittered into Archer’s ear: “

Queer, those fellows who are always wanting to set things right. The people who have the worst cooks are always telling you they’re poisoned when they dine out.

But I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence’s diatribe:—typewriter this time, I understand. …”