The Age of Innocence | Page 8

one
said in a low tone, with a side- glance at Archer.
"Oh, that's part of the campaign: Granny's orders, no doubt," Lefferts
laughed. "When the old lady does a thing she does it thoroughly."
The act was ending, and there was a general stir in the box. Suddenly
Newland Archer felt himself impelled to decisive action. The desire to
be the first man to enter Mrs. Mingott's box, to proclaim to the waiting
world his engagement to May Welland, and to see her through
whatever difficulties her cousin's anomalous situation might involve
her in; this impulse had abruptly overruled all scruples and hesitations,
and sent him hurrying through the red corridors to the farther side of
the house.
As he entered the box his eyes met Miss Welland's, and he saw that she
had instantly understood his motive, though the family dignity which
both considered so high a virtue would not permit her to tell him so.

The persons of their world lived in an atmosphere of faint implications
and pale delicacies, and the fact that he and she understood each other
without a word seemed to the young man to bring them nearer than any
explanation would have done. Her eyes said: "You see why Mamma
brought me," and his answered: "I would not for the world have had
you stay away."
"You know my niece Countess Olenska?" Mrs. Welland enquired as
she shook hands with her future son- in-law. Archer bowed without
extending his hand, as was the custom on being introduced to a lady;
and Ellen Olenska bent her head slightly, keeping her own pale-gloved
hands clasped on her huge fan of eagle feathers. Having greeted Mrs.
Lovell Mingott, a large blonde lady in creaking satin, he sat down
beside his betrothed, and said in a low tone: "I hope you've told
Madame Olenska that we're engaged? I want everybody to know--I
want you to let me announce it this evening at the ball."
Miss Welland's face grew rosy as the dawn, and she looked at him with
radiant eyes. "If you can persuade Mamma," she said; "but why should
we change what is already settled?" He made no answer but that which
his eyes returned, and she added, still more confidently smiling: "Tell
my cousin yourself: I give you leave. She says she used to play with
you when you were children."
She made way for him by pushing back her chair, and promptly, and a
little ostentatiously, with the desire that the whole house should see
what he was doing, Archer seated himself at the Countess Olenska's
side.
"We DID use to play together, didn't we?" she asked, turning her grave
eyes to his. "You were a horrid boy, and kissed me once behind a door;
but it was your cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that I
was in love with." Her glance swept the horse-shoe curve of boxes. "Ah,
how this brings it all back to me--I see everybody here in
knickerbockers and pantalettes," she said, with her trailing slightly
foreign accent, her eyes returning to his face.
Agreeable as their expression was, the young man was shocked that
they should reflect so unseemly a picture of the august tribunal before
which, at that very moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could be
in worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered somewhat
stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very long time."

"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said, "that I'm sure I'm dead
and buried, and this dear old place is heaven;" which, for reasons he
could not define, struck Newland Archer as an even more disrespectful
way of describing New York society.

III.
It invariably happened in the same way.
Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to
appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night
in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and
her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every detail
of the entertainment in her absence.
The Beauforts' house was one of the few in New York that possessed a
ball-room (it antedated even Mrs. Manson Mingott's and the Headly
Chiverses'); and at a time when it was beginning to be thought
"provincial" to put a "crash" over the drawing-room floor and move the
furniture upstairs, the possession of a ball-room that was used for no
other purpose, and left for three-hundred-and-sixty-four days of the
year to shuttered darkness, with its gilt chairs stacked in a corner and its
chandelier in a bag; this undoubted superiority was felt to compensate
for whatever was regrettable in the Beaufort past.
Mrs. Archer, who was fond of coining her social philosophy into
axioms, had once said: "We all have