The Age of Innocence, Page 34

  XXXIV.

  Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in EastThirty-ninth Street.

  He had just got back from a big official reception for the inaugurationof the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle ofthose great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where thethrong of fashion circulated through a series of scientificallycatalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

  "Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some onesay; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sittingalone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figurein a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista ofthe old Museum.

  The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat lookingwith new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been thescene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

  It was the room in which most of the real things of his life hadhappened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken tohim, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the youngwomen of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have achild; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken tochurch in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishopof New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long thepride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first staggeredacross the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse laughed behindthe door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother),had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of ReggieChivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her through herwedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry themto Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled on itsfoundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchangedinstitution.

  It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the futureof the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion forsport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which hadfinally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of arising New York architect.

  The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law andbusiness and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were notabsorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were thatthey were going in for Central American archaeology, for architectureor landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in theprerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adaptingGeorgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word"Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except themillionaire grocers of the suburbs.

  But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in thatlibrary that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany oneevening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:"Hang the professional politician! You're the kind of man the countrywants, Archer. If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like youhave got to lend a hand in the cleaning."

  "Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly hehad risen up at the call! It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appealto roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a manwho set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him wasirresistible.

  Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself WERE whathis country needed, at least in the active service to which TheodoreRoosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, andhad dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, andfrom that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of thereforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of itsapathy. It was little enough to look back on; but when he rememberedto what the young men of his generation and his set had lookedforward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to whichtheir vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the newstate of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-builtwall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by naturea contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things tocontemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendshipto be his strength and pride.

  He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a goodcitizen." In New York, for many years past, every new movement,philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinionand wanted his name. People said: "Ask Archer" when there was aquestion of starting the first school for crippled children,reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club, inauguratingthe new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music. Hisdays were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was alla man ought to ask.

  Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought ofit now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repinedwould have been like despairing because one had not drawn the firstprize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in HISlottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been toodecidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it wasabstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in abook or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that hehad missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept himfrom thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithfulhusband; and when May had suddenly died--carried off by the infectiouspneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he hadhonestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that itdid not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it keptthe dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle ofugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, andmourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.

  His eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas withEnglish mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-whiteand pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlakewriting-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to hisfirst photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.

  There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslinand flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in theMission garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous,faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable ofgrowth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuiltitself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hardbright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered.Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal theirviews from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first,a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, inwhich father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she haddied thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonioushouseholds like her own, and resigned to leave it because she wasconvinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcatein Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped hisparents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her)would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill. And of Mary she wassure as of her own self. So, having snatched little Bill from thegrave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to herplace in the Archer vault in St. Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already laysafe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had nevereven become aware of.

  Opposite May's portrait stood one of her daughter. Mary Chivers was astall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested andslightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. Mary Chivers'smighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with thetwenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. Andthe difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closelygirt as her figure. Mary, who was no
less conventional, and no moreintelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. Therewas good in the new order too.

  The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs,unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the dayswhen the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York'sonly means of quick communication!

  "Chicago wants you."

  Ah--it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent toChicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the Lakeside palace theywere to build for a young millionaire with ideas. The firm always sentDallas on such errands.

  "Hallo, Dad--Yes: Dallas. I say--how do you feel about sailing onWednesday? Mauretania: Yes, next Wednesday as ever is. Our clientwants me to look at some Italian gardens before we settle anything, andhas asked me to nip over on the next boat. I've got to be back on thefirst of June--" the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh--"so wemust look alive. I say, Dad, I want your help: do come."

  Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by andnatural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by thefire. The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, forlong-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course aselectric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the laugh didstartle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles andmiles of country--forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities andbusy indifferent millions--Dallas's laugh should be able to say: "Ofcourse, whatever happens, I must get back on the first, because FannyBeaufort and I are to be married on the fifth."

  The voice began again: "Think it over? No, sir: not a minute. You'vegot to say yes now. Why not, I'd like to know? If you can allege asingle reason--No; I knew it. Then it's a go, eh? Because I count onyou to ring up the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd betterbook a return on a boat from Marseilles. I say, Dad; it'll be our lasttime together, in this kind of way--. Oh, good! I knew you would."

  Chicago rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace up and down theroom.

  It would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy wasright. They would have lots of other "times" after Dallas's marriage,his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and FannyBeaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely tointerfere with their intimacy. On the contrary, from what he had seenof her, he thought she would be naturally included in it. Still,change was change, and differences were differences, and much as hefelt himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was temptingto seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.

  There was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound onethat he had lost the habit of travel. May had disliked to move exceptfor valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea or in themountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving the house inThirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at the Wellands' inNewport. After Dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her dutyto travel for six months; and the whole family had made theold-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland and Italy. Their timebeing limited (no one knew why) they had omitted France. Archerremembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont Blancinstead of Rheims and Chartres. But Mary and Bill wantedmountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in Dallas's wakethrough the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her children,had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic andartistic proclivities. She had indeed proposed that her husband shouldgo to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the Italian lakes afterthey had "done" Switzerland; but Archer had declined. "We'll sticktogether," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting such agood example to Dallas.

  Since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason forhis continuing in the same routine. His children had urged him totravel: Mary Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroadand "see the galleries." The very mysteriousness of such a cure madeher the more confident of its efficacy. But Archer had found himselfheld fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking fromnew things.

  Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one fordoing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of hisgeneration had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong,honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so littlescope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's imagination,so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its dailylevel, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there andwondered....

  What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whosestandards had bent and bound him? He remembered a sneering prophecy ofpoor Lawrence Lefferts's, uttered years ago in that very room: "Ifthings go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort'sbastards."

  It was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing;and nobody wondered or reproved. Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who stilllooked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken hermother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, andcarried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; andFanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a"set" from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashionedbeauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like anIsabey miniature.

  Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after thedeath of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had wonit thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraidof her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty, amusingand accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-mindedenough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father'spast and her own origin. Only the older people remembered so obscurean incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, orthe fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to thenotorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and alittle girl who inherited her beauty. He was subsequently heard of inConstantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later Americantravellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where herepresented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there inthe odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter hadappeared in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. JackWelland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian. Thefact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer'schildren, and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement wasannounced.

  Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that theworld had travelled. People nowadays were too busy--busy with reformsand "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother muchabout their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in thehuge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the sameplane?

  Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaietyof the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion andeagerness of youth.

  It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his wideningwaistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hottemples. He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself inthe presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not. "Itfunctions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," hereflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man hadannounced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family wouldapprove.

  "The difference is that these young people take it for granted thatthey're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always tookit for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's socertain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"

  It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshineheld Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of thePlace Vendome. One of the things he had stipulated--almost the onlyone
--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris,he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."

  "Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed. "I'll takeyou to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving hisfather speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings andemperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went forits quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.

  Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, thescene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, andhe had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska'slife. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household hadgone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down theavenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the publicgardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic rollof the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study andpleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectaclewas before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy,old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with theruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....

  Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "Hullo, father: thisis something like, isn't it?" They stood for a while looking out insilence, and then the young man continued: "By the way, I've got amessage for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-pastfive."

  He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casualitem of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leavefor Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought hesaw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott'smalice.

  "Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued. "Fanny made me swear to dothree things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the lastDebussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. Youknow she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over fromBuenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, andMadame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays.I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's. Andshe's our cousin, of course. So I rang her up this morning, before Iwent out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted tosee her."

  Archer continued to stare at him. "You told her I was here?"

  "Of course--why not?" Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically. Then,getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with aconfidential pressure.

  "I say, father: what was she like?"

  Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze. "Come, ownup: you and she were great pals, weren't you? Wasn't she most awfullylovely?"

  "Lovely? I don't know. She was different."

  "Ah--there you have it! That's what it always comes to, doesn't it?When she comes, SHE'S DIFFERENT--and one doesn't know why. It'sexactly what I feel about Fanny."

  His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. "About Fanny? But, mydear fellow--I should hope so! Only I don't see--"

  "Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric! Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"

  Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was thefirst-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible toinculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. "What's the use ofmaking mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out," healways objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting hiseyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

  "My Fanny?"

  "Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't,"continued his surprising son.

  "I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

  "No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--"

  "Your mother?"

  "Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone--youremember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always wouldbe, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing youmost wanted."

  Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyesremained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below thewindow. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."

  "No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? Andyou never told each other anything. You just sat and watched eachother, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumbasylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more abouteach other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out aboutour own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? Ifyou are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got torush out to Versailles afterward."

  Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spendthe afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal allat once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulatelifetime.

  After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion. Itseemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all,some one had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been hiswife moved him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionateinsight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, theepisode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wastedforces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on abench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of liferolled by....

  A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She hadnever gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some yearsbefore, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothingnow to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.

  He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileriesgardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often wentthere, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a placewhere he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an houror more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle ofafternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in theirhalf-forgotten splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes ofbeauty. After all, his life had been too starved....

  Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: "ButI'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away. For such summerdreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest offriendship, of comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

  He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; andtogether they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over thebridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

  Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, wastalking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles. He had had but oneprevious glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried topack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go withthe family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-surecriticism tripped each other up on his lips.

  As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressivenessincreased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had thefacility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as amaster but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things--theyknow their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesmanof the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, andwith them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

  Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm. "Oh, byJove," he exclaimed.

  They had come out into the great tree-planted space before theInvalides. The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the buddingtrees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itselfall the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbolof the race's glory.

  Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of theavenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarteras quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that litit up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden lightbecame for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. Fornear
ly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangelylittle--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt tobe too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of thetheatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at,the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the peopleshe must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in asetting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the youngFrenchman who had once said to him: "Ah, good conversation--there isnothing like it, is there?"

  Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirtyyears; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of MadameOlenska's existence. More than half a lifetime divided them, and shehad spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a societyhe but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never whollyunderstand. During that time he had been living with his youthfulmemory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangiblecompanionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as somethingapart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dimchapel, where there was not time to pray every day....

  They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one ofthe thoroughfares flanking the building. It was a quiet quarter, afterall, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave onean idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as thiswere left to the few and the indifferent.

  The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there bya yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little squareinto which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

  "It must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's witha movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stoodtogether looking up at the house.

  It was a modern building, without distinctive character, butmany-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-colouredfront. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above therounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings werestill lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

  "I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward theporte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back tosay: "The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings."

  Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the endof their pilgrimage had been attained.

  "I say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.

  The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.

  "I believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.

  "Why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed.

  "Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me."

  Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. "But, I say, Dad: do youmean you won't come up at all?"

  "I don't know," said Archer slowly.

  "If you don't she won't understand."

  "Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."

  Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

  "But what on earth shall I say?"

  "My dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his fatherrejoined with a smile.

  "Very well. I shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking upthe five flights because you don't like lifts."

  His father smiled again. "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough."

  Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture,passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.

  Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awningedbalcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried upin the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted tothe hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured Dallasentering that room with his quick assured step and his delightfulsmile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy"took after him."

  Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably atthat sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a darklady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold outa long thin hand with three rings on it.... He thought she would besitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind heron a table.

  "It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heardhimself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should loseits edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded eachother.

  He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyesnever turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through thewindows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drewup the awnings, and closed the shutters.

  At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer gotup slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.

  A Note on the Text

  The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large installments in ThePictorial Review, from July to October 1920. It was published thatsame year in book form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and inLondon. Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation, and spellingchanges and revisions between the serial and book publication, and morethan thirty subsequent changes were made after the second impression ofthe book edition had been run off. This authoritative text isreprinted from the Library of America edition of Novels by EdithWharton, and is based on the sixth impression of the first edition,which incorporates the last set of extensive revisions that areobviously authorial.