The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [131]
He looked up astonished. ‘‘Is it late?’’
‘‘After seven. I believe you’ve been asleep!’’ She laughed, and drawing out her hatpins, tossed her velvet hat on the sofa. She looked paler than usual, but sparkling with an unwonted animation.
‘‘I went to see Granny, and just as I was going away Ellen came in from a walk; so I stayed and had a long talk with her. It was ages since we’d had a real talk. . . .’’ She had dropped into her usual armchair, facing his, and was running her fingers through her rumpled hair. He fancied she expected him to speak.
‘‘A really good talk,’’ she went on, smiling with what seemed to Archer an unnatural vividness. ‘‘She was so dear—just like the old Ellen. I’m afraid I haven’t been fair to her lately. I’ve sometimes thought—’’
Archer stood up and leaned against the mantelpiece, out of the radius of the lamp.
‘‘Yes, you’ve thought—?’’ he echoed as she paused.
‘‘Well, perhaps I haven’t judged her fairly. She’s so different—at least on the surface. She takes up such odd people—she seems to like to make herself conspicuous. I suppose it’s the life she’s led in that fast European society; no doubt we seem dreadfully dull to her. But I don’t want to judge her unfairly.’’
She paused again, a little breathless with the unwonted length of her speech, and sat with her lips slightly parted and a deep blush on her cheeks.
Archer, as he looked at her, was reminded of the glow which had suffused her face in the mission garden at St. Augustine. He became aware of the same obscure effort in her, the same reaching out toward something beyond the usual range of her vision.
‘‘She hates Ellen,’’ he thought, ‘‘and she’s trying to overcome the feeling and to get me to help her to overcome it.’’
The thought moved him, and for a moment he was on the point of breaking the silence between them and throwing himself on her mercy.
‘‘You understand, don’t you,’’ she went on, ‘‘why the family have sometimes been annoyed? We all did what we could for her at first—but she never seemed to understand. And now this idea of going to see Mrs. Beaufort, of going there in Granny’s carriage! I’m afraid she’s quite alienated the van der Luydens. . . .’’
‘‘Ah,’’ said Archer with an impatient laugh. The open door had closed between them again.
‘‘It’s time to dress; we’re dining out, aren’t we?’’ he asked, moving from the fire.
She rose also, but lingered near the hearth. As he walked past her she moved forward impulsively, as though to detain him. Their eyes met, and he saw that hers were of the same swimming blue as when he had left her to drive to Jersey City.
She flung her arms about his neck and pressed her cheek to his.
‘‘You haven’t kissed me today,’’ she said in a whisper, and he felt her tremble in his arms.
32
‘‘AT THE Court of the Tuileries,’’ said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his reminiscent smile, ‘‘such things were pretty openly tolerated.’’
The scene was the van der Luydens’ black walnut dining room on Madison Avenue, and the time the evening after Newland Archer’s visit to the Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden had come to town for a few days from Skuytercliff, whither they had precipitately fled at the announcement of Beaufort’s failure. It had been represented to them that the disarray into which society had been thrown by this deplorable affair made their presence in town more necessary than ever. It was one of the occasions when, as Mrs. Archer put it, they ‘‘owed it to society’’ to show themselves at the opera, and even to open their own doors.
‘‘It will never do, my dear Louisa, to let people like Mrs. Lemuel Struthers think they can step into Regina’s shoes. It is just at such times that new people push in and get a footing. It was owing to the epidemic of chicken pox in New York the winter Mrs. Struthers first appeared that the married men slipped away to her house while their wives were in the nursery. You and dear Henry, Louisa, must stand in the breach as you always have.’