The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [24]
After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs. Archer and Janey trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing room, where, while the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood worktable with a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry band of field flowers destined to adorn an ‘‘occasional’’ chair in the drawing room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.
While this rite was in progress in the drawing room, Archer settled Mr. Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed him a cigar. Mr. Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them), and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said: ‘‘You say the secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow? Well, he was still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met ’em living at Lausanne together.’’
Newland reddened. ‘‘Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.’’
He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. ‘‘Women ought to be free—as free as we are,’’ he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted a sardonic whistle.
‘‘Well,’’ he said after a pause, ‘‘apparently Count Olenski takes your view; for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife back.’’
6
THAT EVENING, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of ‘‘The Fencers’’ on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked singularly homelike and welcoming.
As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes, and gay, innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but an uncharted voyage on seas.
The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His own exclamation, ‘‘Women should be free—as free as we are,’’ struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as nonexistent. ‘‘Nice’’ women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a hum-buggingdisguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed’s cousin, conduct that, on his own wife’s part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course, the dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn’t a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his wife’s rights would be if he were. But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and May’s, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable. What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a ‘‘decent