The Age of Innocence

ld-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.