Chapter 4

The next day, the first engagement visits began. Old New York had exact and unchanging rules for these visits. So Newland Archer, with his mother and sister, first called on Mrs. Welland, May's mother.

Then he drove with Mrs. Welland and May to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's house. May's grandmother was the head of the family. The couple came for her blessing, her official good wishes.

The young man always enjoyed a visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott. The house itself was already a piece of history. Still, it was not as respected as the older houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were pure 1830, full of dark rose-patterned carpets, black stone fireplaces, and tall dark bookcases behind glass.

Mrs. Mingott built her house later and threw out the heavy furniture of her younger years. She mixed the old family pieces with light, playful French furniture of the Second Empire.

She liked to sit at her ground-floor sitting-room window and watch for life and fashion to flow north. She was in no hurry, for her patience equaled her confidence.

She was sure of what was coming. One day the board walls, the holes where men cut stone, and the one-story drinking houses would disappear. So would the ragged gardens, the wooden greenhouses, and the rocks where goats, little farm animals, stood watching.

In their place would rise houses as grand as her own. Perhaps, she thought — for she was a fair woman — even grander. And the rough street stones, where old horse-buses bumped, would become smooth hard roads, like those people saw in Paris.

Meanwhile, she never suffered in her far corner of the city. Everyone she cared to see came to her. She could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts, without adding one dish to her simple evening meals.

In her middle years, fat came down on her like a river of fire that buries a city. Before, she was a round, active little woman with a neat foot and ankle. After, she was vast and grand, like a force of nature. She accepted it as calmly as all her other troubles.

Now, in extreme old age, she had her reward. Her mirror showed firm pink and white skin, wide and almost without lines. In the middle, the marks of a small face survived, as if waiting to be dug out.

Soft rolls of skin stepped down to her snow-white chest, under thin white cloth. A tiny painted picture of the late Mr. Mingott held the cloth in place. Below, black silk flowed, wave after wave, over the arms of her chair. Her two tiny white hands rested on the black waves like sea birds.

Her great weight stopped her from using stairs. In her own independent way, she put the visiting rooms upstairs and lived on the ground floor. It broke every rule of proper New York living.

A visitor beside her could see straight into her bedroom, for the door was always open. Past the yellow curtain, you saw a huge low bed, covered like a great soft seat. You saw a dressing table with playful cloth edges and a gold-framed mirror.

Her visitors were surprised and strangely interested. It felt foreign, like a scene from a French novel. That was how women with lovers lived in the shameless old societies of Europe. All the rooms lay on one floor, close together. The simple American never dreamed of such things.

Newland Archer found this quietly funny. In secret, he placed the love scenes of "Monsieur de Camors," a French novel, in Mrs. Mingott's bedroom. A blameless old woman lived on a stage set for secret lovers. Yet he thought, with real respect, that if this fearless woman wanted a lover, she would have one.

To everyone's relief, the Countess Olenska was not in her grandmother's sitting room. Mrs. Mingott said Ellen was out. On a day of such bright sun, at the busy shopping hour, this seemed wrong in itself. A woman with a damaged name should not show herself so freely.

Still, her absence spared them an uncomfortable meeting. It kept the shadow of her unhappy past away from the couple's bright future.

The visit went well, as everyone expected. Old Mrs. Mingott was very pleased about the engagement. The watchful family saw it coming years before and carefully approved it. The ring itself pleased her completely. It was a large thick sapphire, a deep-blue stone, held by little metal points too small to see.

"It is the new setting," Mrs. Welland explained. "Of course it shows the stone beautifully. But to old-fashioned eyes it looks a little bare." She gave a careful, friendly look to her daughter's future husband.

"Old-fashioned eyes? I hope you don't mean mine, my dear? I like all the new things," said the old lady. She lifted the stone to her small bright eyes, which never needed glasses.

"Very handsome," she added, and gave back the ring. "Very rich, very free. In my time a cameo set in pearls was thought enough." A cameo was a small carved picture-stone.

"But a ring is only as beautiful as the hand that wears it. Isn't that true, my dear Mr. Archer?" She waved a tiny hand with small pointed nails. Rolls of aged fat circled her wrist like little white rings.

"The great Ferrigiani made a model of mine in Rome. You should have May's hand done too. No doubt he will do it, my child. Her hand is large — these modern sports spread the fingers — but the skin is white."

She broke off and fixed her eyes on Archer's face. "And when is the wedding to be?"

"Oh—" Mrs. Welland said softly. The young man smiled at May and answered, "As soon as it possibly can be, Mrs. Mingott. If only you will back me up."

"We must give them time to know each other a little better, mamma," Mrs. Welland said. Her voice made the proper show of holding back.

The old lady answered, "Know each other? Foolishness! Everybody in New York has always known everybody."

"Let the young man have his way, my dear. Don't wait till the wine goes flat."

"Marry them before Lent," she went on. Lent was the quiet church season in early spring. "Any winter now, a lung sickness may kill me. And I want to give the wedding breakfast."

The family gave each statement its proper answer: a laugh, a cry of surprise, a word of thanks. The visit was ending in light, easy talk when the door opened. The Countess Olenska came in, still in her street hat and coat. Behind her came a man nobody expected. It was Julius Beaufort.

The ladies greeted each other with pleased family voices. Mrs. Mingott held out to the banker the tiny hand of Ferrigiani's model.

"Ha! Beaufort, this is a rare honor!" she cried. She had an odd, foreign way of calling men by their family names.

"Thank you. I wish it happened more often," said Beaufort in his easy, proud way. "But I am kept so tied down. I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square, and she was kind enough to let me walk home with her."

"Ah! I hope this house will be brighter now, with Ellen here!" cried Mrs. Mingott with grand, shameless boldness.

"Sit down, sit down, Beaufort, and push up the yellow armchair. Now that I have you, I want a good gossip."

"I hear your ball was wonderful. And I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers? Well, I want to see the woman for myself."

She forgot her family, and Ellen Olenska led them out into the hall. Old Mrs. Mingott never hid how much she liked Beaufort. The two were alike. Both were cool, both liked to rule, and both took short cuts through the rules of society.

She was eager to learn one thing. Why did the Beauforts invite Mrs. Lemuel Struthers for the first time? Mrs. Struthers was a widow, a woman whose husband was dead. His money came from Struthers's Shoe-polish, a paste for shining shoes.

The year before, she came back from long years in Europe. Now she meant to attack the small closed castle of New York society.

"Of course, if you and Regina invite her, the thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money. And I hear she is still very good-looking," said the old lady hungrily, like a meat-eating animal.

In the hall, Mrs. Welland and May put on their furs, coats of animal skin. Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was watching him with a faint, questioning smile.

"Of course you know already — about May and me," he said with a shy laugh. "May blamed me for not giving you the news last night at the Opera. She ordered me to tell you that we were engaged. But I couldn't, in that crowd."

The smile passed from the Countess's eyes to her lips. She looked younger, more like the bold, brown Ellen Mingott he knew when they were children.

"Of course I know. Yes. And I am so glad," she said. "But one does not tell such things first in a crowd." The ladies were at the door, 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 only of Mrs. Mingott. They spoke of her age, her spirit, her wonderful ways. No one said one word about Ellen Olenska.

But Archer knew what Mrs. Welland was thinking. "Ellen has made a mistake. She is out on Fifth Avenue with Julius Beaufort, at the crowded hour, on her first day home."

The young man added his own silent thought. "She should know that a newly engaged man does not spend his time visiting married women. But perhaps, in the world she has lived in, people do. Perhaps they never do anything else."

Archer was proud of his cosmopolitan views, his open ideas from the whole world. But in spite of them, he thanked God he was a New Yorker. Soon he would join his life to one of his own kind.