The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (story read aloud TXT) 📕

across the tea and muffins.

 

“It’s all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them.

But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I’ve never

met. And what shall I wear?”

 

Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.

She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.

The moist English air seemed to have deepened the

bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of

her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner

glow of happiness, shining through like a light under

ice.

 

“Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had

come from Paris last week.”

 

“Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan’t know

WHICH to wear.” She pouted a little. “I’ve never dined

out in London; and I don’t want to be ridiculous.”

 

He tried to enter into her perplexity. “But don’t

Englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the

evening?”

 

“Newland! How can you ask such funny questions?

When they go to the theatre in old ball-dresses and

bare heads.”

 

“Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home;

but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle won’t.

They’ll wear caps like my mother’s—and shawls; very

soft shawls.”

 

“Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?”

 

“Not as well as you, dear,” he rejoined, wondering

what had suddenly developed in her Janey’s morbid

interest in clothes.

 

She pushed back her chair with a sigh. “That’s dear

of you, Newland; but it doesn’t help me much.”

 

He had an inspiration. “Why not wear your wedding-dress? That can’t be wrong, can it?”

 

“Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it’s gone to

Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth

hasn’t sent it back.”

 

“Oh, well—” said Archer, getting up. “Look here—

the fog’s lifting. If we made a dash for the National

Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the

pictures.”

 

The Newland Archers were on their way home, after

a three months’ wedding-tour which May, in writing to

her girl friends, vaguely summarised as “blissful.”

 

They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection,

Archer had not been able to picture his wife in

that particular setting. Her own inclination (after a

month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering

in July and swimming in August. This plan they

punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and

Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretat,

on the Normandy coast, which some one had recommended

as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the

mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said:

“There’s Italy”; and May, her feet in a gentian-bed,

had smiled cheerfully, and replied: “It would be lovely

to go there next winter, if only you didn’t have to be in

New York.”

 

But in reality travelling interested her even less than

he had expected. She regarded it (once her clothes were

ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking,

riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating

new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally

got back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight

while he ordered HIS clothes) she no longer concealed

the eagerness with which she looked forward to

sailing.

 

In London nothing interested her but the theatres

and the shops; and she found the theatres less exciting

than the Paris cafes chantants where, under the blossoming

horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she had

had the novel experience of looking down from the

restaurant terrace on an audience of “cocottes,” and

having her husband interpret to her as much of the

songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

 

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas

about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the

tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated

their wives than to try to put into practice the theories

with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.

There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife

who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free;

and he had long since discovered that May’s only use

of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be

to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate

dignity would always keep her from making the gift

abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had)

when she would find strength to take it altogether back

if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But

with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and

incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about

only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct;

and the fineness of her feeling for him made that

unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would

always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged

him to the practice of the same virtues.

 

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits

of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of

pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since

the lines of her character, though so few, were on the

same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary

divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.

 

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven

foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant

a companion; but he saw at once how they would

fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of

being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual

life would go on, as it always had, outside the

domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing

small and stifling—coming back to his wife would never

be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the

open. And when they had children the vacant corners

in both their lives would be filled.

 

All these things went through his mind during their

long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington,

where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived. Archer too

would have preferred to escape their friends’ hospitality:

in conformity with the family tradition he had

always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting

a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a

few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer

Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled

ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the

rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all

seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as

unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women,

deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to

feel the need of retailing to every one they met, and the

magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who

were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences,

were too different from the people Archer had grown

up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous

hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination

long. To introduce his wife into such a society was out

of the question; and in the course of his travels no

other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

 

Not long after their arrival in London he had run

across the Duke of St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly

and cordially recognising him, had said: “Look me up,

won’t you?”—but no proper-spirited American would

have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and

the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed

to avoid May’s English aunt, the banker’s wife,

who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely

postponed going to London till the autumn in order

that their arrival during the season might not appear

pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.

 

“Probably there’ll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry’s—London’s

a desert at this season, and you’ve made yourself

much too beautiful,” Archer said to May, who sat at

his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her

sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed

wicked to expose her to the London grime.

 

“I don’t want them to think that we dress like

savages,” she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might

have resented; and he was struck again by the religious

reverence of even the most unworldly American women

for the social advantages of dress.

 

“It’s their armour,” he thought, “their defence against

the unknown, and their defiance of it.” And he understood

for the first time the earnestness with which

May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair

to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of

selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

 

He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs.

Carfry’s to be a small one. Besides their hostess and her

sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing-room,

only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was her

husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her

nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes

whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a French

name as she did so.

 

Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer

floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed

larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her

husband had ever seen her; and he perceived that the

rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme

and infantile shyness.

 

“What on earth will they expect me to talk about?”

her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment

that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same

anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even when

distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly

heart; and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were

soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her

ease.

 

In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was

a languishing affair. Archer noticed that his wife’s way

of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to

become more uncompromisingly local in her references,

so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to

admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee.

The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor,

who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English,

gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the

ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up

to the drawing-room.

 

The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry

away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared

to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. But Archer and

the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly

Archer found himself talking as he had not done since

his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry

nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with

consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland,

where he had spent two years in the milder air of

Lake Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been

entrusted to M. Riviere, who had brought him back to

England, and was to remain with him till he went up to

Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added

with simplicity that he should then have to look out for

another job.

 

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should

be long without one, so varied were his interests and so

many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a

thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him

common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave

an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous

or cheap in his animation.

 

His father, who had died young, had filled a small

diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son

should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste

for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,

then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at

length—after other experiments