The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (8 ebook reader .txt) 📗

The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of a curious reversal of mood. There was something about the luxury of the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his system like a narcotic. The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious. But now it was the Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the blood in his veins.

All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May’s side, watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort’s trotters.

“A party for the Blenkers⁠—the Blenkers?”

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eyeglasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:

“Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and Mrs. Welland’s company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club on August 25th at 3 o’clock punctually. To meet Mrs. and the Misses Blenker.

“Red Gables, Catherine Street. R.S.V.P.”

“Good gracious⁠—” Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

“Poor Amy Sillerton⁠—you never can tell what her husband will do next,” Mrs. Welland sighed. “I suppose he’s just discovered the Blenkers.”

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society; and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable and venerated family tree. He was, as people said, a man who had had “every advantage.” His father was Sillerton Jackson’s uncle, his mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and position, and mutual suitability. Nothing⁠—as Mrs. Welland had often remarked⁠—nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did. But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right to expect “something different,” and money enough to keep her own carriage.

No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to Paris or Italy. But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs, because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots and send an unwilling representative.

“It’s a wonder,” Mrs. Welland remarked, “that they didn’t choose the Cup Race day! Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for a black man on the day of Julia Mingott’s thé dansant? Luckily this time there’s nothing else going on that I know of⁠—for of course some of us will have to go.”

Mr. Welland sighed nervously. “ ‘Some of us,’ my dear⁠—more than one? Three o’clock is such a very awkward hour. I have to be here at half-past three to take my drops: it’s really no use trying to follow Bencomb’s new treatment if I don’t do it systematically; and if I join you later, of course I shall miss my drive.” At the thought he laid down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his finely-wrinkled cheek.

“There’s no reason why you should go at all, my dear,” his wife answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic. “I have some cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I’ll drop in at about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that she hasn’t been slighted.” She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter. “And if Newland’s afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness.”

It was a principle in the Welland family that people’s days and hours should be what Mrs. Welland called “provided for.” The melancholy possibility of having to “kill time” (especially for those who did not care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist. Another of her principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of adjusting this respect for May’s independence with the exigency of Mr. Welland’s claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity which left not a second of Mrs. Welland’s own time unprovided for.

“Of course I’ll drive with Papa⁠—I’m sure Newland will find something to do,” May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his lack of response. It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days. Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof, when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered paradoxically: “Oh, I think for a change I’ll just save it instead of spending it⁠—” and once, when she and May had had to go on a long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the