The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [37]
Beaufort stood, hat in hand, saying something which his companion seemed to negative; then they shook hands, and he jumped into his carriage while she mounted the steps.
When she entered the room she showed no surprise at seeing Archer there; surprise seemed the emotion that she was least addicted to.
“How do you like my funny house?” she asked. “To me it’s like heaven.”
As she spoke she untied her little velvet bonnet and tossing it away with her long cloak stood looking at him with meditative eyes.
“You’ve arranged it delightfully,” he rejoined, alive to the flatness of the words, but imprisoned in the conventional by his consuming desire to be simple and striking.
“Oh, it’s a poor little place. My relations despise it. But at any rate it’s less gloomy than the van der Luydens‘.”
The words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy. Those privileged to enter it shivered there, and spoke of it as “handsome.” But suddenly he was glad that she had given voice to the general shiver.
“It’s delicious—what you’ve done here,” he repeated.
“I like the little house,” she admitted; “but I suppose what I like is the blessedness of its being here, in my own country and my own town; and then, of being alone in it.” She spoke so low that he hardly heard the last phrase; but in his awkwardness he took it up.
“You like so much to be alone?”
“Yes; as long as my friends keep me from feeling lonely.” She sat down near the fire, said, “Nastasia will bring the tea presently,” and signed to him to return to his armchair, adding: “I see you’ve already chosen your corner.”
Leaning back, she folded her arms behind her head, and looked at the fire under drooping lids.
“This is the hour I like best—don’t you?”
A proper sense of his dignity caused him to answer: “I was afraid you’d forgotten the hour. Beaufort must have been very engrossing.”
She looked amused. “Why—have you waited long? Mr. Beaufort took me to see a number of houses—since it seems I’m not to be allowed to stay in this one.” She appeared to dismiss both Beaufort and himself from her mind, and went on: “I’ve never been in a city where there seems to be such a feeling against living in des quartiers excentriques. What does it matter where one lives? I’m told this street is respectable.”
“It’s not fashionable.”
“Fashionable! Do you all think so much of that? Why not make one’s own fashions? But I suppose I’ve lived too independently; at any rate, I want to do what you all do—I want to feel cared for and safe.”
He was touched, as he had been the evening before when she spoke of her need of guidance.
“That’s what your friends want to feel. New York’s an awfully safe place,” he added with a flash of sarcasm.
“Yes, isn’t it? One feels that,” she cried, missing the mockery. “Being here is like—like—being taken on a holiday when one has been a good little girl and done all one’s lessons.”
The analogy was well meant, but did not altogether please him. He did not mind being flippant about New York, but disliked to hear any one else take the same tone. He wondered if she did not begin to see what a powerful engine it was, and how nearly it had crushed her. The Lovell Mingotts’ dinner, patched up in extremis out of all sorts of social odds and ends, ought to have taught her the narrowness of her escape; but either she had been all along unaware of having skirted disaster, or else she had lost sight of it in the triumph of the van der Luyden evening. Archer inclined to the former theory; he fancied that her New York was still completely undifferentiated, and the conjecture nettled him.
“Last night,” he said, “New York laid itself out for you. The van der Luydens do nothing by halves.”
“No: how kind they are! It was such a nice party. Every one seems to have such an esteem for them.”
The terms were hardly adequate; she might have