The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [121]
For a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper: ‘‘What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?’’
‘‘Why—you know it will, don’t you?’’
‘‘Your vision of you and me together?’’ She burst into a sudden, hard laugh. ‘‘You choose your place well to put it to me!’’
‘‘Do you mean because we’re in my wife’s brougham? Shall we get out and walk, then? I don’t suppose you mind a little snow?’’
She laughed again, more gently. ‘‘No; I shan’t get out and walk, because my business is to get to Granny’s as quickly as I can. And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.’’
‘‘I don’t know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this.’’
She met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled down an obscure side street and then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth Avenue.
‘‘Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?’’ she asked.
The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
‘‘I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that— won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other, and nothing else on earth will matter.’’
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. ‘‘Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?’’ she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on, ‘‘I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.’’
He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the phrase she had used a little while before.
‘‘Yes, the Gorgon has dried your tears,’’ he said.
‘‘Well, she opened my eyes, too; it’s a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re never again in the blessed darkness. Isn’t there a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it’s a miserable little country!’’
The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May’s sturdy brougham horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky trotter. Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
‘‘Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?’’ he asked.
‘‘For us? But there’s no us in that sense! We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.’’
‘‘Ah, I’m beyond that,’’ he groaned.
‘‘No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I have,’’ she said in a strange voice, ‘‘and I know what it looks like