Chapter 6

That evening Mr. Jackson went home. The ladies went up to their bedroom, with its flowered cotton at the windows. Newland Archer climbed to his own study, deep in thought.

As always, a careful hand kept the fire alive and the lamp bright. The room held rows and rows of books and photographs of famous paintings. Above the fire stood "The Fencers," two small metal sword-fighters. It looked warm and welcoming, like home.

He dropped into his armchair. His eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland, her gift from the first days of their love. Now it stood in place of every other picture.

With new wonder, close to fear, he looked at her open forehead, serious eyes, and happy, innocent mouth. An innocent girl knew nothing of life's dark side. He was to be the keeper of this young soul.

May was the frightening product of the social system he belonged to and believed in. Here was the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything. Through May Welland's familiar face, she looked back at him like a stranger.

Once more he saw the truth. People taught him marriage was a safe resting place. It was a journey on unknown seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska stirred his old, settled beliefs. It set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His own words came back to him. "Women should be free — as free as we are." They struck at the root of a problem his world agreed to call unreal.

"Nice" women, even when men wronged them, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant. So generous men like himself could offer it all the more warmly, in words. Such warm words were only a false cover. Under them lay the hard old rules that held people to the old pattern.

But now his own words bound him to defend the Countess, his future wife's cousin. Yet suppose his own wife did the same. Then he would call down on her all the thunder of Church and State.

Of course the question was not real. He was no worthless Polish count. So it was foolish to ask what his wife's rights would be if he were one.

But Newland Archer had too much imagination to stop there. The tie between him and May might rub and hurt for far quieter reasons.

What could he and May really know of each other? His duty, as a "decent" man, was to hide his past from her. Hers, as a girl ready for marriage, was to have no past at all.

What if, some day, they grew tired of each other? What if they misunderstood each other, or made each other angry?

He went over his friends' marriages, the ones people called happy. Not one came near his hope of a life-long, passionate, and tender friendship with May. Such a friendship needed a woman with experience, a quick free mind, and her own judgment. And May's world trained her with care to have none of these things.

A cold fear ran through him. He saw his marriage becoming like the marriages around him — a dull tie of money and social interests. It would hold together because the wife knew nothing and the husband pretended.

Lawrence Lefferts, he thought, lived this ideal most fully. Lefferts was the high priest of "form." A high priest serves a god, and "form" was the god Lefferts served. He shaped his wife so fully to his own comfort that she saw nothing.

Even at the most public moments of his love-affairs with other men's wives, she went about smiling. "Lawrence is so terribly correct," she would tell people.

At any mention of Julius Beaufort her face turned red with anger, and she looked away. For Beaufort, a "foreigner" of doubtful family, kept a second, secret home, with another woman in it.

Archer comforted himself. He was not such a fool as Larry Lefferts. And May was no such simple soul as poor Gertrude. But the difference was one of brains, not of rules.

In truth they all lived in a hieroglyphic world — a world of signs, like old picture-writing. There no one ever said the real thing, or did it, or even thought it. Everything was shown by agreed signs.

Mrs. Welland knew exactly why Archer pressed her, at the Beaufort ball, to announce her daughter's engagement. She even expected it of him. Yet she felt she must pretend to be unwilling, as if her hand was forced.

People of high culture were then reading books about early man. Her act came straight from those books. In them, the wild man drags his new wife, screaming, from her parents' tent.

So May stood at the center of this system of hiding. Her very openness and sureness made her harder to read, not easier.

She was open, poor darling, because she had nothing to hide. She was sure because she knew of nothing to guard against. With no better training than this, she would fall overnight into what people carefully called "the facts of life."

The young man was truly, but calmly, in love. He delighted in May's bright good looks, her health, her fine riding, and her quick, easy way at games. He loved her shy new interest in books and ideas, which grew under his teaching.

She was far enough along to laugh with him at a famous poem, the Idylls of the King. But she could not yet feel the beauty of Ulysses or the Lotus Eaters.

She was honest, true, and brave. She had a sense of humor — the chief proof was that she laughed at his jokes. Deep in her innocent, watching soul he suspected a warm feeling. To wake it would be a joy.

But the list was short, and he came to the end of it discouraged. All this openness and innocence, he thought, was only a product, made by careful hands.

Human nature, when no one trains it, is not open and innocent. It is full of twists and tricks, and it defends itself without thinking.

This false purity pressed on him. Mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and long-dead grandmothers worked in secret to make it. The world said it was what he wanted, and his by right. His right was the proud pleasure of breaking it himself, like an image made of snow.

There was nothing new in these thoughts. Young men often think them as their wedding day comes near. But such thoughts usually come with shame and self-blame. Newland Archer felt no trace of either.

The heroes in Thackeray's novels often cry out in sorrow. They cannot offer the girl they marry a clean blank page for the spotless one she gives. Those heroes always made Archer a little angry. He could not feel sorry in that way.

But one fact stood firm. If both of them were raised as May was, they would be helpless. They would be as lost as the Babes in the Wood, the two children of an old story.

After all his worried thought, he found no honest reason for the difference. Why should his bride not have the same freedom of experience as himself? The only true reasons were his own passing pleasure, and the passion of male vanity.

Questions like these were natural at such an hour. But he knew why they pressed so hard and stayed so clear. The Countess Olenska came at exactly the wrong moment.

Here he was, newly engaged, at a time meant for pure thoughts and cloudless hopes. Instead he stood in the middle of a scandal — loud public talk about shameful things. It raised all the questions he most wanted to leave sleeping.

"Hang Ellen Olenska!" he said in a low, angry voice. He covered his fire and began to undress.

He could not see how her fate touched his at all. Yet he dimly felt he had only begun to measure the risks of his stand as the Countess's defender. That duty came with his promise to May.

A few days later, the blow fell.

The Lovell Mingotts sent out cards for what New York called "a formal dinner." That meant three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and a Roman punch in the middle. A Roman punch was an iced drink for grand dinners.

At the head of the cards they printed "To meet the Countess Olenska." It followed the warm American custom that treats strangers like kings and queens, or at least their messengers.

The list of guests showed boldness and fine judgment. People who knew the family saw a firm hand in it. It was the hand of "Catherine the Great" — old Mrs. Manson Mingott.

New York asked the Selfridge Merrys everywhere, out of old habit. The Beauforts could claim family ties. And there were Mr. Sillerton Jackson and his sister Sophy, who went wherever her brother told her.

Then came the flower of the fashionable young married set, all with the cleanest of names. There were the Lawrence Leffertses, and Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth, the lovely lady whose husband was dead. There were the Harry Thorleys and the Reggie Chiverses. And there was young Morris Dagonet with his wife, a van der Luyden.

The choice was perfect, for all belonged to the small inner circle of New York. Through the long season it played together day and night, and never seemed to tire.

Forty-eight hours later, the unbelievable happened. Everyone said no to the Mingotts — everyone except the Beauforts, old Mr. Jackson, and his sister.

The refusal was meant to hurt. Two things made that plain. Even the Reggie Chiverses, who belonged to the Mingott family, said no.

And every note used the same words. The writers "regretted that they were unable to accept." Not one gave the polite excuse of an earlier promise. Good manners asked for at least that much.

New York society in those days was small, with few pleasures. Even the carriage men, the house servants, and the cooks knew which evenings people were free. So the Mingotts' guests could make their message cruelly clear. They would not meet the Countess Olenska.

The blow was unexpected. But the Mingotts, in their family way, faced it bravely. Mrs. Lovell Mingott carried the trouble quietly to Mrs. Welland, who carried it to Newland Archer.

Archer burned with anger. He went to his mother and demanded that she act. She resisted inside and delayed outside. The struggle was painful.

Then, as always, she gave in to her son. Her old doubts only doubled her energy now.

She took up his cause at once. She put on her grey velvet bonnet and said, "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."

The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small, slippery pyramid — wide at the base, narrow at the top. So far, hardly anyone cut a crack in it or won a foothold.

Its base was a firm ground of what Mrs. Archer called "plain people." They were honest, quiet families of good name. Some rose above it by marriage into one of the ruling houses. The Spicers, the Leffertses, and the Jacksons rose that way.

People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as careful as they used to be. Old Catherine Spicer ruled one end of Fifth Avenue, and Julius Beaufort ruled the other. So you could not expect the old ways to last much longer.

Above this rich but quiet base, the pyramid narrowed. Here stood the firm little ruling group of the Mingotts, the Newlands, the Chiverses, and the Mansons. Most people believed it was the very top.

But the group itself, at least in Mrs. Archer's generation, knew better. To the men who studied family lines for a living, only a few families could claim that place.

Newspapers liked to write of a New York "aristocracy" — families set above all others by high birth.

"Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern newspaper silliness about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it. No, and neither do the Newlands or the Chiverses.

"Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch traders. They came here when this country still belonged to England, to make their money. They stayed because they did so well.

"One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration of Independence. Another was a general on Washington's staff. After the battle of Saratoga, he received the sword of the British general Burgoyne.

"These are things to be proud of. But they have nothing to do with rank or class. New York has always been a trading city. Not more than three families in it can claim aristocratic origin in the real sense of the word."

Mrs. Archer and her children, like all New York, knew who these favored few were. The Dagonets of Washington Square came of an old English county family, tied to the Pitts and the Foxes.

The Lannings married into the line of Count de Grasse. The van der Luydens, highest of all, came straight down from the first Dutch Governor of Manhattan. Marriages before the American Revolution tied them to the French and British aristocracy.

Of the Lannings, only two very old but lively Miss Lannings remained. They lived happily among memories, family pictures, and fine old Chippendale furniture. The Dagonets were a large family, tied to the best names of Baltimore and Philadelphia.

But the van der Luydens stood above them all. They had faded into a pale evening light, high above the common world. Out of that light only two figures stood out: Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

Before her marriage, Mrs. Henry van der Luyden was Louisa Dagonet. Her mother was the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, from an old family of the Channel Islands. The Colonel fought under the British general Cornwallis.

After the war he settled in Maryland with his wife, Lady Angelica Trevenna. She was the fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey. The Dagonets, the du Lacs of Maryland, and their high-born cousins in Cornwall, the Trevennas, always stayed close and warm.

The van der Luydens more than once paid long visits to the Duke of St. Austrey. He was the head of the Trevenna family.

They stayed at his country house in Cornwall, and at St. Austrey in Gloucestershire. The Duke often said he would some day return the visit — without the Duchess, who feared the Atlantic.

The couple divided their time between two homes. One was Trevenna, their place in Maryland. The other was Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson River. An estate was a great house with wide lands of its own.

The old Dutch government gave that land to the famous first Governor. Mr. van der Luyden was still its "Patroon," the old Dutch title for the master of that land.

Their large, serious house on Madison Avenue stayed closed most of the year. When they came to town, they received only their closest friends.

"I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said. She stopped suddenly at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa likes you. Of course, I am taking this step because of dear May. And also because, if we do not all stand together, there will be no such thing as Society left."