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

The young man’s colour again rose. “I used to see her in her husband’s house. I have known Count Olenski for many years. You can imagine that he would not have sent a stranger on such a mission.”

Archer’s gaze, wandering away to the blank walls of the office, rested on a hanging calendar surmounted by the rugged features of the President of the United States. That such a conversation should be going on anywhere within the millions of square miles subject to his rule seemed as strange as anything that the imagination could invent.

“The change⁠—what sort of a change?”

“Ah, Monsieur, if I could tell you!” M. Rivière paused. “Tenez⁠—the discovery, I suppose, of what I’d never thought of before: that she’s an American. And that if you’re an American of her kind⁠—of your kind⁠—things that are accepted in certain other societies, or at least put up with as part of a general convenient give-and-take⁠—become unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If Madame Olenska’s relations understood what these things were, their opposition to her returning would no doubt be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to regard her husband’s wish to have her back as proof of an irresistible longing for domestic life.” M. Rivière paused, and then added: “Whereas it’s far from being as simple as that.”

Archer looked back to the President of the United States, and then down at his desk and at the papers scattered on it. For a second or two he could not trust himself to speak. During this interval he heard M. Rivière’s chair pushed back, and was aware that the young man had risen. When he glanced up again he saw that his visitor was as moved as himself.

“Thank you,” Archer said simply.

“There’s nothing to thank me for, Monsieur: it is I, rather⁠—” M. Rivière broke off, as if speech for him too were difficult. “I should like, though,” he continued in a firmer voice, “to add one thing. You asked me if I was in Count Olenski’s employ. I am at this moment: I returned to him, a few months ago, for reasons of private necessity such as may happen to anyone who has persons, ill and older persons, dependent on him. But from the moment that I have taken the step of coming here to say these things to you I consider myself discharged, and I shall tell him so on my return, and give him the reasons. That’s all, Monsieur.”

M. Rivière bowed and drew back a step.

“Thank you,” Archer said again, as their hands met.

Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of window-curtains.

By the first of November this household ritual was over, and society had begun to look about and take stock of itself. By the fifteenth the season was in full blast, Opera and theatres were putting forth their new attractions, dinner-engagements were accumulating, and dates for dances being fixed. And punctually at about this time Mrs. Archer always said that New York was very much changed.

Observing it from the lofty standpoint of a nonparticipant, she was able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface, and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered rows of social vegetables. It had been one of the amusements of Archer’s youth to wait for this annual pronouncement of his mother’s, and to hear her enumerate the minute signs of disintegration that his careless gaze had overlooked. For New York, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, never changed without changing for the worse; and in this view Miss Sophy Jackson heartily concurred.

Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world, suspended his judgment and listened with an amused impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies. But even he never denied that New York had changed; and Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year of his marriage, was himself obliged to admit that if it had not actually changed it was certainly changing.

These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs. Archer’s Thanksgiving dinner. At the date when she was officially enjoined to give thanks for the blessings of the year it was her habit to take a mournful though not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what there was to be thankful for. At any rate, not the state of society; society, if it could be said to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call down Biblical imprecations⁠—and in fact, everyone knew what the Reverend Dr. Ashmore meant when he chose a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse 25) for his Thanksgiving sermon. Dr. Ashmore, the new Rector of St. Matthew’s, had been chosen because he was very “advanced”: his sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in language. When he fulminated against fashionable society he always spoke of its “trend”; and to Mrs. Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating to feel herself part of a community that was trending.

“There’s no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is right: there is a marked trend,” she said, as if it were something visible and measurable, like a crack in a house.

“It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving,” Miss Jackson opined; and her hostess drily rejoined: “Oh, he means us to give thanks for what’s left.”

Archer had been wont to smile at these annual vaticinations of his mother’s; but this year even he was obliged to acknowledge, as he listened to an enumeration of the changes, that the “trend” was visible.

“The extravagance in dress⁠—” Miss Jackson began. “Sillerton took me to the first night of the Opera, and I can only tell you that Jane Merry’s dress was the only one I recognised from last year; and even that had had the front panel changed. Yet I know she got it out from Worth only two years ago, because my seamstress always goes in to make over her Paris dresses before she wears