The Age of Innocence

t 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.