The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [best 7 inch ereader txt] 📗

she began at once; and without waiting for his reply: “Oh, don’t ask me why! She gave so many reasons that I’ve forgotten them all. My private belief is that she couldn’t face the boredom. At any rate that’s what Augusta and my daughters-in-law think. And I don’t know that I altogether blame her. Olenski’s a finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it is in Fifth Avenue. Not that the family would admit that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de la Paix thrown in. And poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of going back to her husband. She held out as firmly as ever against that. So she’s to settle down in Paris with that fool Medora.⁠ ⁠… Well, Paris is Paris; and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing. But she was as gay as a bird, and I shall miss her.” Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her bosom.

“All I ask is,” she concluded, “that they shouldn’t bother me any more. I must really be allowed to digest my gruel.⁠ ⁠…” And she twinkled a little wistfully at Archer.

It was that evening, on his return home, that May announced her intention of giving a farewell dinner to her cousin. Madame Olenska’s name had not been pronounced between them since the night of her flight to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with surprise.

“A dinner⁠—why?” he interrogated.

Her colour rose. “But you like Ellen⁠—I thought you’d be pleased.”

“It’s awfully nice⁠—your putting it in that way. But I really don’t see⁠—”

“I mean to do it, Newland,” she said, quietly rising and going to her desk. “Here are the invitations all written. Mother helped me⁠—she agrees that we ought to.” She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image of the Family.

“Oh, all right,” he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of guests that she had put in his hand.

When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over the fire and trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate tiles.

The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden’s orchids had been conspicuously disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver. Mrs. Newland Archer’s drawing-room was generally thought a great success. A gilt bamboo jardinière, in which the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed, blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of the Venus of Milo); the sofas and armchairs of pale brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.

“I don’t think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up,” said May, rising flushed from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of pardonable pride. The brass tongs which she had propped against the side of the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband’s answer; and before he could restore them Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden were announced.

The other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der Luydens liked to dine punctually. The room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing to Mrs. Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished Verbeckhoven Study of Sheep, which Mr. Welland had given May for Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska at his side.

She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser and heavier than ever. Perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children’s parties, when Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.

The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as he did at that minute. Their hands met, and he thought he heard her say: “Yes, we’re sailing tomorrow in the Russia⁠—”; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and after an interval May’s voice: “Newland! Dinner’s been announced. Won’t you please take Ellen in?”

Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing-room. All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself: “If it were only to see her hand again I should have to follow her⁠—.”

It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a “foreign visitor” that Mrs. van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host’s left. The fact of Madame Olenska’s “foreignness” could hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by this farewell tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her displacement with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval. There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval. Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from