The Age of Innocence

hat evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies
had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted
thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the
fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows
of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the
mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked
singularly home-like and welcoming.

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a
large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in
the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the
other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at the
frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young
creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying product
of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who
knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a
stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was
borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been
taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions
and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His own
exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the
root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as
non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the
kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were
therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to
concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a
humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things
together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was
pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that,
on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all
the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purely
hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was
absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE. But
Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and
May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,
as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a
marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one
of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should
tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed
his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that
answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which
he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived
that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the
versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully
trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his
marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a
dull association of material and social interests held together by
ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. Lawrence
Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely
realised this enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of form, he
had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the
most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's
wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence
was so frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly,
and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact
that Julius Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had
what was known in New York as "another establishment."

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. Welland, who
knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's
engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no
less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having
had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that
people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is
dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

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."

The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the
radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,
her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and
ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She had
advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,
but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was
straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chiefly
proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depths
of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy
to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned
discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were
only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and
innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctive
guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious
purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts
and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to
be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might
exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those
habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But they
were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement
of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as
Thackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a
blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she
was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had
been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find
their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his
anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected
with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)
why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of
experience as himself.

Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind;
but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision
were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska. Here he
was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure thoughts
and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised
all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie. "Hang
Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to
undress. He could not really see why her fate should have the least
bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to
measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced
upon him.

A few days later the bolt fell.

The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal
dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and
a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the
words "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the hospitable
American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or
at least as their ambassadors.

The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in
which the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.
Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who
were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts, on
whom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and
his sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were some
of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant
"young married" set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth
(the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and young
Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The company
indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged to the
little inner group of people who, during the long New York season,
disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently
undiminished zest.

Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had
refused the Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr.
Jackson and his sister. The intended slight was emphasised by the fact
that even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were
among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in
all of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept,"
without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary
courtesy prescribed.

New York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in
its resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers,
butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were
free; and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell
Mingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not to
meet the Countess Olenska.

The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met it
gallantly. Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who
confided it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed
passionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful
period of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his
instances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause with
an energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet
bonnet and said: "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."

The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,
in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.
At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called "plain
people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who
(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) had
been raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.
People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used to
be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, and
Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions to
last much longer.

Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum
was the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands,
Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imagined
them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at least
those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of the
professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could
lay claim to that eminence.

"Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this
modern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is
one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor the
Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants,
who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here because
they did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed the
Declaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, and
received General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. These
are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or
class. New York has always been a commercial community, and there are
not more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin
in the real sense of the word."

Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York,
knew who these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of Washington
Square, who came of an old English county family allied with the Pitts
and Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants of
Count de Grasse, and the van der Luydens, direct descendants of the
first Dutch governor of Manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionary
marriages to several members of the French and British aristocracy.

The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively
Miss Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family
portraits and Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan,
allied to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van der
Luydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind of
super-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressively
emerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother had
been the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island
family, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,
after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter
of the Earl of St. Austrey. The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacs
of Maryland, and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas,
had always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had
more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house of
Trevenna, the Duke of St. Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall and
at St. Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently
announced his intention of some day returning their visit (without the
Duchess, who feared the Atlantic).

Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, their
place in Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson
which had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to
the famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still
"Patroon." Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom
opened, and when they came to town they received in it only their most
intimate friends.

"I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenly
pausing at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa is fond of you; and of
course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and also
because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing as
Society left."