The Age of Innocence | Page 4

sprinkling the falling daisy
petals with notes as clear as dew.
She sang, of course, "M'ama!" and not "he loves me," since an
unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the
German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be
translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English- speaking
audiences. This seemed as natural to Newland Archer as all the other
conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using
two silver- backed brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part
his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably
a gardenia) in his buttonhole.
"M'ama . . . non m'ama . . . " the prima donna sang, and "M'ama!", with
a final burst of love triumphant, as she pressed the dishevelled daisy to

her lips and lifted her large eyes to the sophisticated countenance of the
little brown Faust-Capoul, who was vainly trying, in a tight purple
velvet doublet and plumed cap, to look as pure and true as his artless
victim.
Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box,
turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the
house. Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to
attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable
nights by some of the younger members of the family. On this occasion,
the front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lovell
Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn
behind these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes
ecstatically fixed on the stagelovers. As Madame Nilsson's "M'ama!"
thrilled out above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking
during the Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek,
mantled her brow to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young
slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker
fastened with a single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense
bouquet of lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw
her white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath
of satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.
No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged
to be very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with
the Opera houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights,
was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance
symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops
formed the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with
large pink and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the
roses, and closely resembling the floral pen- wipers made by female
parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath
the rose- trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose- branch
flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off
prodigies.
In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white
cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue
girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her

muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's
impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his
designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the
ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting obliquely from
the right wing.
"The darling!" thought Newland Archer, his glance flitting back to the
young girl with the lilies-of-the- valley. "She doesn't even guess what
it's all about." And he contemplated her absorbed young face with a
thrill of possessorship in which pride in his own masculine initiation
was mingled with a tender reverence for her abysmal purity. "We'll
read Faust together . . . by the Italian lakes . . ." he thought, somewhat
hazily confusing the scene of his projected honey-moon with the
masterpieces of literature which it would be his manly privilege to
reveal to his bride. It was only that afternoon that May Welland had let
him guess that she "cared" (New York's consecrated phrase of maiden
avowal), and already his imagination, leaping ahead of the engagement
ring, the betrothal kiss and the march from Lohengrin, pictured her at
his side in some scene of old European witchery.
He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a
simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to
develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own
with the most popular married women of the "younger set," in which it
was the recognised custom to attract masculine homage while playfully
discouraging it. If he had