The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting,

Gilded :-)

It was not May's fault, poor dear. If, now and then, during their travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.

She definitely is a child of old society

"But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I used often to remind my Ellen—" Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and the outer world;

Archer felt irrationally angry. His host's contemptuous tribute to May's "niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. 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?

"After all, I wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband." He burst into a laugh. "Sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she turned a puzzled frown on him he added: "I don't think I ever heard you say a cruel thing before." "Cruel?" "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."

No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women,

Gay?

Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer found the strength to break in:

Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise. "Madame Olenska—didn't you know she'd been called away?" "Called away?—"

What

"But I didn't look round on purpose." "On purpose?" "I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies. So I went down to the beach." "To get away from me as far as you could?" She repeated in a low voice: "To get away from you as far as I could."

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation.

There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.

"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."

"What's the use—when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU? crying out to her beneath his words.

What her answer really said was: "If you lift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess." He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission. "What a life for you!—" he groaned. "Oh—as long as it's a part of yours." "And mine a part of yours?" She nodded. "And that's to be all—for either of us?" "Well; it IS all, isn't it?"

Everybody knew that the Countess Olenska was no longer in the good graces of her family. Even her devoted champion, old Mrs. Manson Mingott, had been unable to defend her refusal to return to her husband.

"The change will do you good," she said simply, when he had finished; "and you must be sure to go and see Ellen," she added, looking him straight in the eyes with her cloudless smile, and speaking in the tone she might have employed in urging him not to neglect some irksome family duty.

"Of course you understand that I know all that people have been saying about Ellen, and heartily sympathise with my family in their effort to get her to return to her husband. I also know that, for some reason you have not chosen to tell me, you have advised her against this course, which all the older men of the family, as well as our grandmother, agree in approving; and that it is owing to your encouragement that Ellen defies us all, and exposes herself to the kind of criticism of which Mr. Sillerton Jackson probably gave you, this evening, the hint that has made you so irritable....

by letting you understand that I know you mean to see Ellen when you are in Washington, and are perhaps going there expressly for that purpose;

New York was inexorable in its condemnation of business irregularities. So far there had been no exception to its tacit rule that those who broke the law of probity must pay; and every one was aware that even Beaufort and Beaufort's wife would be offered up unflinchingly to this principle.

On the Wednesday morning, when he reached his office, Mr. Letterblair met him with a troubled face. Beaufort, after all, had not managed to "tide over"; but by setting afloat the rumour that he had done so he had reassured his depositors, and heavy payments had poured into the bank till the previous evening, when disturbing reports again began to predominate. In consequence, a run on the bank had begun, and its doors were likely to close before the day was over. The ugliest things were being said of Beaufort's dastardly manoeuvre, and his failure promised to be one of the most discreditable in the history of Wall Street.

"But why on earth she should make you telegraph for Ellen Olenska—" and May's clear voice rejoin: "Perhaps it's to urge on her again that after all her duty is with her husband."

"Oh, I'm not going," Archer answered. "Not going? Why, what's happened?" Her voice was as clear as a bell, and full of wifely solicitude. "The case is off—postponed." "Postponed? How odd! I saw a note this morning from Mr. Letterblair to Mamma saying that he was going to Washington tomorrow for the big patent case that he was to argue before the Supreme Court. You said it was a patent case, didn't you?"

Waiting For Ellen. Uff lying to his wife

"Yes; it IS awfully convenient," May brightly agreed, "that you should be able to meet Ellen after all; you saw how much Mamma appreciated your offering to do it."

As he paced the platform, waiting for the Washington express, he remembered that there were people who thought there would one day be a tunnel under the Hudson through which the trains of the Pennsylvania railway would run straight into New York. They were of the brotherhood of visionaries who likewise predicted the building of ships that would cross the Atlantic in five days, the invention of a flying machine, lighting by electricity, telephonic communication without wires, and other Arabian Night marvels.

Haha is this fake prophecy by the author ?

"I mean: how shall I explain? I—it's always so. EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN." "Oh, yes: I know! I know!" "Does it—do I too: to you?" he insisted. She nodded, looking out of the window. "Ellen—Ellen—Ellen!"

exclaimed. "Oh, no—but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in her voice. "Call it what you like: you look at things as they are." "Ah—I've had to. I've had to look at the Gorgon." "Well—it hasn't blinded you! You've seen that she's just an old bogey like all the others." "She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears."

"I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won't exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter." She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked;

"Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears," he said.

"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."

The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.

"My dear, you're handsomer than ever!" Archer rejoined in the same tone; and she threw back her head and laughed. "Ah, but not as handsome as Ellen!" she jerked out, twinkling at him maliciously; and before he could answer she added: "Was she so awfully handsome the day you drove her up from the ferry?"

"Safer from loving me?" Her profile did not stir, but he saw a tear overflow on her lashes and hang in a mesh of her veil. "Safer from doing irreparable harm. Don't let us be like all the others!" she protested.

She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his. "You haven't kissed me today," she said in a whisper; and he felt her tremble in his arms.

It had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they "owed it to society" to show themselves at the Opera, and even to open their own doors.

On this particular evening they had invited Sillerton Jackson, Mrs. Archer and Newland and his wife to go with them to the Opera, where Faust was being sung for the first time that winter.

So we circled around

May still looked at him with transparent eyes. "Why—since she's going back to Europe so soon; since Granny approves and understands, and has arranged to make her independent of her husband—"

"My head aches too; good-night, dear," she said, and turned to the door, her torn and muddy wedding-dress dragging after her across the room.

And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies.

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.

"That is, if the doctors will let me go ... but I'm afraid they won't. For you see, Newland, I've been sure since this morning of something I've been so longing and hoping for—"

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years before, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothing now to keep her and Archer apart—and that afternoon he was to see her.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.