The Age of Innocence--Edith Wharton [41]
The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in his study, Janey wandered in on him. He had failed to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his class. He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
‘‘Sameness—sameness!’’ he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take in the discussion. The duke, of course, would be their principal theme, though the appearance on Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-colored brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into. Such ‘‘women’’ (as they were called) were few in New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the appearance of Miss Fanny Ring on Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society. Only the day before, her carriage had passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s, and the latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home. ‘‘What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?’’ people asked each other with a shudder. Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.
He raised his head irritably when his sister, Janey, entered, and then quickly bent over his book (Swinburne’s Chastelard—just out) as if he had not seen her. She glanced at the writing table heaped with books, opened a volume of the Contes Drôlatiques, made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: ‘‘What learned things you read!’’
‘‘Well—?’’ he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.
‘‘Mother’s very angry.’’
‘‘Angry? With whom? About what?’’
‘‘Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here. She brought word that her brother would come in after dinner: she couldn’t say very much, because he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself. He’s with Cousin Louisa van der Luyden now.’’
‘‘For heaven’s sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. It would take an omniscient deity to know what you’re talking about.’’
‘‘It’s not a time to be profane, Newland. . . . Mother feels badly enough about your not going to church . . .’’
With a groan he plunged back into his book.
‘‘Newland! Do listen. Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s party last night: she went there with the duke and Mr. Beaufort.’’
At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man’s breast. To smother it he laughed. ‘‘Well, what of it? I knew she meant to.’’
Janey paled and her eyes began to project. ‘‘You knew she meant to—and you didn’t try to stop her? To warn her?’’
‘‘Stop her? Warn her?’’ He laughed again. ‘‘I’m not engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska!’’ The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.
‘‘You’re marrying into her family.’’
‘‘Oh, family—family!’’ he jeered.
‘‘Newland—don’t you care about family?’’
‘‘Not a brass farthing.’’
‘‘Nor about what Cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?’’
‘‘Not the half of one—if she thinks such old maid’s rubbish.’’
‘‘Mother is not an old maid,’’ said his virgin sister with pinched lips.
He felt like shouting back: ‘‘Yes, she is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of reality.’’ But he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.
‘‘Hang Countess Olenska! Don’t be a goose, Janey— I’m not her keeper.