The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [135]
May sat without moving or speaking while the clock slowly measured out five minutes. A lump of coal fell forward in the grate, and hearing her rise to push it back, Archer at length turned and faced her.
‘‘It’s impossible,’’ he exclaimed.
‘‘Impossible—?’’
‘‘How do you know—what you’ve just told me?’’ ‘‘I saw Ellen yesterday—I told you I’d seen her at Granny’s.’’
‘‘It wasn’t then that she told you?’’
‘‘No; I had a note from her this afternoon. Do you want to see it?’’
He could not find his voice, and she went out of the room and came back almost immediately.
‘‘I thought you knew,’’ she said simply.
She laid a sheet of paper on the table, and Archer put out his hand and took it up. The letter contained only a few lines.
‘‘May dear, I have at last made Granny understand that my visit to her could be no more than a visit, and she has been as kind and generous as ever. She sees now that if I return to Europe I must live by myself, or rather with poor Aunt Medora, who is coming with me. I am hurrying back to Washington to pack up, and we sail next week. You must be very good to Granny when I’m gone—as good as you’ve always been to me. Ellen.
‘‘If any of my friends wish to urge me to change my mind, please tell them it would be utterly useless.’’
Archer read the letter over two or three times; then he flung it down and burst out laughing.
The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled Janey’s midnight fright when she had caught him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over May’s telegram announcing that the date of their marriage had been advanced.
‘‘Why did she write this?’’ he asked, checking his laugh with a supreme effort.
May met the question with her unshaken candour. ‘‘I suppose because we talked things over yesterday—’’
‘‘What things?’’
‘‘I told her I was afraid I hadn’t been fair to her— hadn’t always understood how hard it must have been for her here, alone among so many people who were relations and yet strangers; who felt the right to criticise, and yet didn’t always know the circumstances.’’ She paused. ‘‘I knew you’d been the one friend she could always count on; and I wanted her to know that you and I were the same—in all our feelings.’’
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and then added slowly: ‘‘She understood my wishing to tell her this. I think she understands everything.’’
She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold hands, pressed it quickly against her cheek.
‘‘My head aches, too; good night, dear,’’ she said, and turned to the door, her torn and muddy wedding dress dragging after her across the room.
33
IT WAS, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good deal of company in an informal way. Archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs. Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked anyone to the house; but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her. It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from Henderson’s, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but by its manifold implications—since it signifiedeither canvasbacks or terrapin, two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full décolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.
It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom refused even by the seasoned