The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins and flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow. All were young and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent her soul upon some feat of strength.

“Gad,” Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, “not one of the lot holds the bow as she does”; and Beaufort retorted: “Yes; but that’s the only kind of target she’ll ever hit.”

Archer felt irrationally angry. His host’s contemptuous tribute to May’s “niceness” was just what a husband should have wished to hear said of his wife. The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words sent a faint shiver through his heart. What if “niceness” carried to that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an emptiness? As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her final bull’s-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that curtain.

She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace. No one could ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them. But when her eyes met her husband’s her face glowed with the pleasure she saw in his.

Mrs. Welland’s basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they drove off among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and Archer sitting at her side.

The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of victorias, dogcarts, landaus and “vis-à-vis,” carrying well-dressed ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.

“Shall we go to see Granny?” May suddenly proposed. “I should like to tell her myself that I’ve won the prize. There’s lots of time before dinner.”

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue, crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond. In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orné on a bit of cheap land overlooking the bay. Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs spread themselves above the island-dotted waters. A winding drive led up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus. One of these rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days, enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set in motion stirred only the fringe of the antimacassars on the chair-arms.

Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites toward the person served. She was persuaded that irrepressible passion was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.

She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow which had been pinned on May’s bosom at the conclusion of the match, remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things handsomely.

“Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear,” the old lady chuckled. “You must leave it in fee to your eldest girl.” She pinched May’s white arm and watched the colour flood her face. “Well, well, what have I said to make you shake out the red flag? Ain’t there going to be any daughters⁠—only boys, eh? Good gracious, look at her blushing again all over her blushes! What⁠—can’t I say that either? Mercy me⁠—when my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out overhead I always say I’m too thankful to have somebody about me that nothing can shock!”

Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.

“Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora,” the ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed: “Cousin Medora? But I thought she was going back to Portsmouth?” she answered placidly: “So she is⁠—but she’s got to come here first to pick up Ellen. Ah⁠—you didn’t know Ellen had come to spend the day with me? Such fol-de-rol, her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young people about fifty years ago. Ellen⁠—Ellen!” she cried in her shrill old voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn beyond the verandah.

There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick on the shiny floor. A mulatto maidservant in a bright turban, replying to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen “Miss Ellen” going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to Archer.

“Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will describe the party to me,” she said; and Archer stood up as if in a dream.

He had heard the Countess Olenska’s name pronounced often enough during the year and a