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

the millions of square miles subject to his rule

seemed as strange as anything that the imagination

could invent.

 

“The change—what sort of a change?”

 

“Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!” M. Riviere paused.

“Tenez—the discovery, I suppose, of what I’d never

thought of before: that she’s an American. And that if

you’re an American of HER kind—of your kind—things

that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least

put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take—become unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If

Madame Olenska’s relations understood what these things

were, their opposition to her returning would no doubt

be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to

regard her husband’s wish to have her back as proof of

an irresistible longing for domestic life.” M. Riviere

paused, and then added: “Whereas it’s far from being

as simple as that.”

 

Archer looked back to the President of the United

States, and then down at his desk and at the papers

scattered on it. For a second or two he could not trust

himself to speak. During this interval he heard M.

Riviere’s chair pushed back, and was aware that the

young man had risen. When he glanced up again he

saw that his visitor was as moved as himself.

 

“Thank you,” Archer said simply.

 

“There’s nothing to thank me for, Monsieur: it is I,

rather—” M. Riviere broke off, as if speech for him

too were difficult. “I should like, though,” he continued

in a firmer voice, “to add one thing. You asked me

if I was in Count Olenski’s employ. I am at this moment:

I returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons

of private necessity such as may happen to any one

who has persons, ill and older persons, dependent on

him. But from the moment that I have taken the step of

coming here to say these things to you I consider myself

discharged, and I shall tell him so on my return,

and give him the reasons. That’s all, Monsieur.”

 

M. Riviere bowed and drew back a step.

 

“Thank you,” Archer said again, as their hands met.

 

XXVI.

 

Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue

opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung

up its triple layer of window-curtains.

 

By the first of November this household ritual was

over, and society had begun to look about and take

stock of itself. By the fifteenth the season was in full

blast, Opera and theatres were putting forth their new

attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and

dates for dances being fixed. And punctually at about

this time Mrs. Archer always said that New York was

very much changed.

 

Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant, she was able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton

Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its

surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between

the ordered rows of social vegetables. It had been one

of the amusements of Archer’s youth to wait for this

annual pronouncement of his mother’s, and to hear her

enumerate the minute signs of disintegration that his

careless gaze had overlooked. For New York, to Mrs.

Archer’s mind, never changed without changing for the

worse; and in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily

concurred.

 

Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world,

suspended his judgment and listened with an amused

impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies. But even

he never denied that New York had changed; and

Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year of his

marriage, was himself obliged to admit that if it had

not actually changed it was certainly changing.

 

These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs.

Archer’s Thanksgiving dinner. At the date when she was

officially enjoined to give thanks for the blessings of

the year it was her habit to take a mournful though not

embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there

was to be thankful for. At any rate, not the state of

society; society, if it could be said to exist, was rather a

spectacle on which to call down Biblical imprecations—

and in fact, every one knew what the Reverend Dr.

Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah

(chap. ii., verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon.

Dr. Ashmore, the new Rector of St. Matthew’s, had

been chosen because he was very “advanced”: his

sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in

language. When he fulminated against fashionable society

he always spoke of its “trend”; and to Mrs. Archer

it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel herself part

of a community that was trending.

 

“There’s no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right: there IS

a marked trend,” she said, as if it were something

visible and measurable, like a crack in a house.

 

“It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving,”

Miss Jackson opined; and her hostess drily

rejoined: “Oh, he means us to give thanks for what’s

left.”

 

Archer had been wont to smile at these annual

vaticinations of his mother’s; but this year even he was

obliged to acknowledge, as he listened to an enumeration

of the changes, that the “trend” was visible.

 

“The extravagance in dress—” Miss Jackson began.

“Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I

can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only

one I recognised from last year; and even that had had

the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from

Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always

goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she

wears them.”

 

“Ah, Jane Merry is one of US,” said Mrs. Archer

sighing, as if it were not such an enviable thing to be in

an age when ladies were beginning to flaunt abroad

their Paris dresses as soon as they were out of the

Custom House, instead of letting them mellow under

lock and key, in the manner of Mrs. Archer’s contemporaries.

 

“Yes; she’s one of the few. In my youth,” Miss

Jackson rejoined, “it was considered vulgar to dress in

the newest fashions; and Amy Sillerton has always told

me that in Boston the rule was to put away one’s Paris

dresses for two years. Old Mrs. Baxter Pennilow, who

did everything handsomely, used to import twelve a

year, two velvet, two satin, two silk, and the other six

of poplin and the finest cashmere. It was a standing

order, and as she was ill for two years before she died

they found forty-eight Worth dresses that had never

been taken out of tissue paper; and when the girls left

off their mourning they were able to wear the first lot

at the Symphony concerts without looking in advance

of the fashion.”

 

“Ah, well, Boston is more conservative than New

York; but I always think it’s a safe rule for a lady to

lay aside her French dresses for one season,” Mrs.

Archer conceded.

 

“It was Beaufort who started the new fashion by

making his wife clap her new clothes on her back as

soon as they arrived: I must say at times it takes all

Regina’s distinction not to look like … like …” Miss

Jackson glanced around the table, caught Janey’s bulging

gaze, and took refuge in an unintelligible murmur.

 

“Like her rivals,” said Mr. Sillerton Jackson, with

the air of producing an epigram.

 

“Oh,—” the ladies murmured; and Mrs. Archer added,

partly to distract her daughter’s attention from forbidden

topics: “Poor Regina! Her Thanksgiving hasn’t

been a very cheerful one, I’m afraid. Have you heard

the rumours about Beaufort’s speculations, Sillerton?”

 

Mr. Jackson nodded carelessly. Every one had heard

the rumours in question, and he scorned to confirm a

tale that was already common property.

 

A gloomy silence fell upon the party. No one really

liked Beaufort, and it was not wholly unpleasant to

think the worst of his private life; but the idea of his

having brought financial dishonour on his wife’s family

was too shocking to be enjoyed even by his enemies.

Archer’s New York tolerated hypocrisy in private relations;

but in business matters it exacted a limpid and

impeccable honesty. It was a long time since any well-known banker had failed discreditably; but every one

remembered the social extinction visited on the heads

of the firm when the last event of the kind had

happened. It would be the same with the Beauforts, in spite

of his power and her popularity; not all the leagued

strength of the Dallas connection would save poor

Regina if there were any truth in the reports of her

husband’s unlawful speculations.

 

The talk took refuge in less ominous topics; but

everything they touched on seemed to confirm Mrs.

Archer’s sense of an accelerated trend.

 

“Of course, Newland, I know you let dear May go

to Mrs. Struthers’s Sunday evenings—” she began; and

May interposed gaily: “Oh, you know, everybody goes

to Mrs. Struthers’s now; and she was invited to Granny’s

last reception.”

 

It was thus, Archer reflected, that New York

managed its transitions: conspiring to ignore them till they

were well over, and then, in all good faith, imagining

that they had taken place in a preceding age. There was

always a traitor in the citadel; and after he (or generally

she) had surrendered the keys, what was the use of

pretending that it was impregnable? Once people had

tasted of Mrs. Struthers’s easy Sunday hospitality they

were not likely to sit at home remembering that her

champagne was transmuted Shoe-Polish.

 

“I know, dear, I know,” Mrs. Archer sighed. “Such

things have to be, I suppose, as long as AMUSEMENT is

what people go out for; but I’ve never quite forgiven

your cousin Madame Olenska for being the first person

to countenance Mrs. Struthers.”

 

A sudden blush rose to young Mrs. Archer’s face; it

surprised her husband as much as the other guests

about the table. “Oh, ELLEN—” she murmured, much in

the same accusing and yet deprecating tone in which

her parents might have said: “Oh, THE BLENKERS—.”

 

It was the note which the family had taken to sounding

on the mention of the Countess Olenska’s name,

since she had surprised and inconvenienced them by

remaining obdurate to her husband’s advances; but on

May’s lips it gave food for thought, and Archer looked

at her with the sense of strangeness that sometimes

came over him when she was most in the tone of her

environment.

 

His mother, with less than her usual sensitiveness to

atmosphere, still insisted: “I’ve always thought that

people like the Countess Olenska, who have lived in

aristocratic societies, ought to help us to keep up our

social distinctions, instead of ignoring them.”

 

May’s blush remained permanently vivid: it seemed

to have a significance beyond that implied by the

recognition of Madame Olenska’s social bad faith.

 

“I’ve no doubt we all seem alike to foreigners,” said

Miss Jackson tartly.

 

“I don’t think Ellen cares for society; but nobody

knows exactly what she does care for,” May continued,

as if she had been groping for something noncommittal.

 

“Ah, well—” Mrs. Archer sighed again.

 

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 Mingotts had not proclaimed their disapproval

aloud: their sense of solidarity was too strong. They

had simply, as Mrs. Welland said, “let poor Ellen find

her own level”—and that, mortifyingly and

incomprehensibly, was in the dim depths where the Blenkers

prevailed, and “people who wrote” celebrated their

untidy rites. It was incredible, but it was a fact, that

Ellen, in spite of all