The Age of Innocence

s he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,
the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he
cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of
club and chop-house banter.

He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby
round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the
Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at
a little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not in
the mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined
on the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh,
well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice
too."

They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here,
what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of
yours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts
seems so smitten by."

Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the
devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all,
why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to
manifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a
journalist.

"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.

"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The
fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to
settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down
her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed
in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully
bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too
dazzled to ask her name."

A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing
extraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a
neighbour's child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed
in bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor
Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.

"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."

"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know
Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."

"They would be, if you'd let them."

"Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to the
obstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the
fashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.

"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our
slum?"

"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of
our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his
own picture of her.

"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well,
here's my corner."

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and
musing on his last words.

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most
interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had
allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are
still struggling.

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never
seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of
journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett
had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that
his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or might
merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes,
or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social
observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it
cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to
consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in
a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring
"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed their
clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on the
number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less
self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated
by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean
bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner
and carry him off for a long talk.

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; but after
publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of
which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, and
the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) to
make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his real
calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, where
fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England
love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was
inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile
bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His
conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and
feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained still
less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and
curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views
usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once
said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only
one ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in
my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't you get into
touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."

Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash the
unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the
others--Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in
America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could
hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at
the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."

"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they'
yourselves?"

Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy
fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal
or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of
thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the
emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

"Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local
patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and
cross-fertilising: 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 ..."

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation back
to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.
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; and that was why the New
York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shake
made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be a
smaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atoms
of Fifth Avenue.

The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceived
that his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and was
filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.
Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustine
with May Welland? No one was deceived by his pretense of professional
activity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr.
Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in the
management of large estates and "conservative" investments, there were
always two or three young men, fairly well-off, and without
professional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day,
sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading the
newspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have an
occupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded as
derogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a more
gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men had
much hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desire
to do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was
already perceptibly spreading.

It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacations
in European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, and
generally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it to
Madame Olenska. But once he was married, what would become of this
narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He had
seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, though
perhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid and
luxurious routine of their elders.

From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, asking
if he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find a
reply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive
any letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified him
beyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster of
yellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. It was
only on the third morning that he received a line by post from the
Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,
whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the
Duke on board his steamer.

"I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usual
preliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kind
friends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.
You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe
here. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional
"Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.

The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenska
running away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? His first
thought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that he
did not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesque
exaggeration. Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was not
wholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were
translating from the French. "Je me suis evadee--" put in that way,
the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely have
wanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was very
likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied of
the pleasure of the moment.

It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her off
to Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefinite
period. The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to
visitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few
thus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, the
delicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and he
remembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to the
young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. The van der Luydens
had rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though there
were many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew that
beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go on
rescuing her.

He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; and
almost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refused
an invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses
at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.

He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank,
with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and a
general flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He had
just received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had
preferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils. But
he now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, and
told the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs. Reggie
didn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and that
there was always a room to spare in her elastic house.