The Age of Innocence, Chapter 9

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
These successive statements were received with the proper expressions of amusement, incredulity and gratitude;
and the visit was breaking up in a vein of mild pleasantry when the door opened to admit the Countess Olenska,
who entered in bonnet and mantle followed by the unexpected figure of Julius Beaufort.

There was a cousinly murmur of pleasure between the Ladies,
and Mrs. Mingott held out Ferrigiani’s model to the banker.
“Ha! Beaufort, this is a rare favour!”
(She had an odd foreign way of addressing men by their surnames.)

“Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener,”
said the visitor in his easy arrogant way.
“I’m generally so tied down;
but I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square,
and she was good enough to let me walk home with her.”

“Ah—I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen’s here!”
cried Mrs. Mingott with a glorious effrontery.
“Sit down—sit down, Beaufort:
push up the yellow armchair;
now I’ve got you I want a good gossip.
I hear your ball was magnificent;
and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers?
Well—I’ve a curiosity to see the woman myself.”

She had forgotten her relatives,
who were drifting out into the hall under Ellen Olenska’s guidance.
Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration for Julius Beaufort,
and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions.
Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the Beauforts
to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of Struthers’s Shoe-polish,
who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe
to lay siege to the tight little citadel of New York.
“Of course if you and Regina invite her
the thing is settled.
Well, we need new blood and new money—
and I hear she’s still very good-looking,”
the carnivorous old lady declared.

In the hall,
while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs,
Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning smile.

“Of course you know already—
about May and me,”
he said, answering her look with a shy laugh.
“She scolded me for not giving you the news last night at the Opera:
I had her orders to tell you that we were engaged—
but I couldn’t, in that crowd.”

The smile passed from Countess Olenska’s eyes to her lips:
she looked younger,
more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood.
“Of course I know; yes.
And I’m so glad.
But one doesn’t tell such things first in a crowd.”
The ladies were on the threshold
and she held out her hand.

“Good-bye; come and see me some day,”
she said, still looking at Archer.

In the carriage, on the way down Fifth Avenue, they talked pointedly of Mrs. Mingott,
of her age, her spirit,
and all her wonderful attributes.
No one alluded to Ellen Olenska;
but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was thinking:
“It’s a mistake for Ellen to be seen,
the very day after her arrival,
parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour with Julius Beaufort—”
and the young man himself mentally added:
“And she ought to know
that a man who’s just engaged
doesn’t spend his time calling on married women.
But I daresay in the set she’s lived in they do—
they never do anything else.”
And, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself,
he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker,
and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.

End of Chapter 4

The AGE of INNOCENCE

BY EDITH WHARTON

BOOK I

Chapter 5

The next evening
old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the Archers.

Mrs. Archer was a shy woman
and shrank from society;
but she liked to be well-informed as to its doings.
Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson
applied to the investigation of his friends’ affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist;
and his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him,
and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother,
brought home bits of minor gossip
that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.

Therefore,
whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted to know about,
she asked Mr. Jackson to dine;
and as she honoured few people with her invitations,
and as she and her daughter Janey were an excellent audience,
Mr. Jackson usually came himself
instead of sending his sister.
If he could have dictated all the conditions,
he would have chosen the evening when Newland was out;
not because the young man was uncongenial to him
(the two got on capitally at their club)
but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt,
on Newland’s part, a tendency to weigh his evidence
that the ladies of the family never showed.

Mr. Jackson, if perfection had been attainable on earth,
would also have asked that Mrs. Archer’s food should be a little better.
But then New York,
as far back as the mind of man could travel,
had been divided into the two great fundamental groups
of the Mingotts and Mansons and all their clan,
who cared about eating and clothes and money,
and the Archer-Newland-van-der-Luyden tribe,
who were devoted to travel, horticulture and the best fiction,
and looked down on the grosser forms of pleasure.

You couldn’t have everything, after all.
If you dined with the Lovell Mingotts
you got canvas-back and terrapin and vintage wines;
at Adeline Archer’s
you could talk about Alpine scenery and “The Marble Faun”;
and luckily the Archer Madeira had gone round the Cape.
Therefore when a friendly summons came from Mrs. Archer,
Mr. Jackson, who was a true eclectic,
would usually say to his sister:
“I’ve been a little gouty since my last dinner at the Lovell Mingotts’—
it will do me good to diet at Adeline’s.”

Mrs. Archer, who had long been a widow,
lived with her son and daughter in West Twenty-eighth Street.
An upper floor was dedicated to Newland,
and the two women squeezed themselves into narrower quarters below.
In an unclouded harmony of tastes and interests
they cultivated ferns in Wardian cases,
made macramé lace and wool embroidery on linen,
collected American revolutionary glazed ware,
subscribed to “Good Words,”
and read Ouida’s novels for the sake of the Italian atmosphere.
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