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

screen of tree-ferns and camellias Newland

pressed her gloved hand to his lips.

 

“You see I did as you asked me to,” she said.

 

“Yes: I couldn’t wait,” he answered smiling. After a

moment he added: “Only I wish it hadn’t had to be at

a ball.”

 

“Yes, I know.” She met his glance comprehendingly.

“But after all—even here we’re alone together, aren’t

we?”

 

“Oh, dearest—always!” Archer cried.

 

Evidently she was always going to understand; she

was always going to say the right thing. The discovery

made the cup of his bliss overflow, and he went on

gaily: “The worst of it is that I want to kiss you and I

can’t.” As he spoke he took a swift glance about the

conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy,

and catching her to him laid a fugitive pressure

on her lips. To counteract the audacity of this proceeding

he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less secluded part

of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke

a lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. She sat silent, and

the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet.

 

“Did you tell my cousin Ellen?” she asked presently,

as if she spoke through a dream.

 

He roused himself, and remembered that he had not

done so. Some invincible repugnance to speak of such

things to the strange foreign woman had checked the

words on his lips.

 

“No—I hadn’t the chance after all,” he said, fibbing

hastily.

 

“Ah.” She looked disappointed, but gently resolved

on gaining her point. “You must, then, for I didn’t

either; and I shouldn’t like her to think—”

 

“Of course not. But aren’t you, after all, the person

to do it?”

 

She pondered on this. “If I’d done it at the right

time, yes: but now that there’s been a delay I think you

must explain that I’d asked you to tell her at the

Opera, before our speaking about it to everybody here.

Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her. You

see, she’s one of the family, and she’s been away so

long that she’s rather—sensitive.”

 

Archer looked at her glowingly. “Dear and great

angel! Of course I’ll tell her.” He glanced a trifle

apprehensively toward the crowded ball-room. “But I haven’t

seen her yet. Has she come?”

 

“No; at the last minute she decided not to.”

 

“At the last minute?” he echoed, betraying his

surprise that she should ever have considered the alternative

possible.

 

“Yes. She’s awfully fond of dancing,” the young girl

answered simply. “But suddenly she made up her mind

that her dress wasn’t smart enough for a ball, though

we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take her

home.”

 

“Oh, well—” said Archer with happy indifference.

Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than

her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit

that ritual of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they

had both been brought up.

 

“She knows as well as I do,” he reflected, “the real

reason of her cousin’s staying away; but I shall never

let her see by the least sign that I am conscious of there

being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen Olenska’s

reputation.”

 

IV.

 

In the course of the next day the first of the usual

betrothal visits were exchanged. The New York

ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters; and in

conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his

mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which

he and Mrs. Welland and May drove out to old Mrs.

Manson Mingott’s to receive that venerable ancestress’s

blessing.

 

A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an

amusing episode to the young man. The house in itself

was already an historic document, though not, of course,

as venerable as certain other old family houses in

University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of

the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched

fireplaces with black marble mantels, and immense

glazed bookcases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs.

Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast

out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled

with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of

the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window

of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching

calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her

solitary doors. She seemed in no hurry to have them

come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence.

She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries,

the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged

gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed

the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences

as stately as her own—perhaps (for she was an

impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobblestones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped

would be replaced by smooth asphalt, such as people

reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as every one

she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her

rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a

single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not

suffer from her geographic isolation.

 

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended

on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed

city had changed her from a plump active little woman

with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as

vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had

accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her

other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded

by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled

expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the

centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if

awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led

down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled

in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature

portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below,

wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges

of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised

like gulls on the surface of the billows.

 

The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott’s flesh had

long since made it impossible for her to go up and

down stairs, and with characteristic independence she

had made her reception rooms upstairs and established

herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York

proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as

you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught

(through a door that was always open, and a looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a

bedroom with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa,

and a toilet-table with frivolous lace flounces and a

gilt-framed mirror.

 

Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the

foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in

French fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality

such as the simple American had never dreamed of.

That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked

old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one

floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their

novels described. It amused Newland Archer (who had

secretly situated the love-scenes of “Monsieur de

Camors” in Mrs. Mingott’s bedroom) to picture her

blameless life led in the stage-setting of adultery; but he

said to himself, with considerable admiration, that if a

lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid woman

would have had him too.

 

To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not

present in her grandmother’s drawing-room during the

visit of the betrothed couple. Mrs. Mingott said she

had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring sunlight,

and at the “shopping hour,” seemed in itself an indelicate

thing for a compromised woman to do. But at any

rate it spared them the embarrassment of her presence,

and the faint shadow that her unhappy past might

seem to shed on their radiant future. The visit went off

successfully, as was to have been expected. Old Mrs.

Mingott was delighted with the engagement, which,

being long foreseen by watchful relatives, had been

carefully passed upon in family council; and the

engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible

claws, met with her unqualified admiration.

 

“It’s the new setting: of course it shows the stone

beautifully, but it looks a little bare to old-fashioned

eyes,” Mrs. Welland had explained, with a conciliatory

side-glance at her future son-in-law.

 

“Old-fashioned eyes? I hope you don’t mean mine,

my dear? I like all the novelties,” said the ancestress,

lifting the stone to her small bright orbs, which no

glasses had ever disfigured. “Very handsome,” she added,

returning the jewel; “very liberal. In my time a cameo

set in pearls was thought sufficient. But it’s the hand

that sets off the ring, isn’t it, my dear Mr. Archer?”

and she waved one of her tiny hands, with small pointed

nails and rolls of aged fat encircling the wrist like ivory

bracelets. “Mine was modelled in Rome by the great

Ferrigiani. You should have May’s done: no doubt he’ll

have it done, my child. Her hand is large—it’s these

modern sports that spread the joints—but the skin is

white.—And when’s the wedding to be?” she broke off,

fixing her eyes on Archer’s face.

 

“Oh—” Mrs. Welland murmured, while the young

man, smiling at his betrothed, replied: “As soon as ever

it can, if only you’ll back me up, Mrs. Mingott.”

 

“We must give them time to get to know each other

a little better, mamma,” Mrs. Welland interposed, with

the proper affectation of reluctance; to which the

ancestress rejoined: “Know each other? Fiddlesticks!

Everybody in New York has always known everybody.

Let the young man have his way, my dear; don’t wait

till the bubble’s off the wine. Marry them before Lent;

I may catch pneumonia any winter now, and I want to

give the wedding-breakfast.”

 

These successive statements were received with the

proper expressions of amusement, incredulity and gratitude;

and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild

pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess

Olenska, who entered in bonnet and mantle followed

by the unexpected figure of Julius Beaufort.

 

There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between

the ladies, and Mrs. Mingott held out Ferrigiani’s model

to the banker. “Ha! Beaufort, this is a rare favour!”

(She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by

their surnames.)

 

“Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener,” said the

visitor in his easy arrogant way. “I’m generally so tied

down; but I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square,

and she was good enough to let me walk home with

her.”

 

“Ah—I hope the house will be gayer, now that

Ellen’s here!” cried Mrs. Mingott with a glorious

effrontery. “Sit down—sit down, Beaufort: push up the yellow

armchair; now I’ve got you I want a good gossip. I

hear your ball was magnificent; and I understand you

invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers? Well—I’ve a curiosity

to see the woman myself.”

 

She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting

out into the hall under Ellen Olenska’s guidance. Old

Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration

for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in

their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through

the conventions. Now she was eagerly curious to know

what had decided the Beauforts to invite (for the first

time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of Struthers’s

Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year from

a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the

tight little citadel of New York. “Of course if you and

Regina invite her the thing is settled. Well, we need

new blood and new money—and I hear she’s still very