“This is hopeless—I’ll ask
for a private room,” he said; and Madame Olenska,
without offering any objection, waited while he went
in search of it. The room opened on a long wooden
verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows.
It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a
coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of
pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. No
more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered
its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer fancied
he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly
amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite
to him. A woman who had run away from her husband—
and reputedly with another man—was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things for granted;
but something in the quality of her composure took
the edge from his irony. By being so quiet,
so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush
away the conventions and make him feel that to seek
to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends
who had so much to say to each other. . . .
XXIV.
They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals
between rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken,
they had much to say, and yet moments when saying
became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of
silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs,
not with conscious intention but because he did not
want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on
the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she
talked to him of the year and a half since they had
met.
She had grown tired of what people called “society”;
New York was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable;
she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed
her back; but after the first flush of novelty she
had found herself, as she phrased it, too “different”
to care for the things it cared about—and
so she had decided to try Washington, where one was
supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down
in Washington, and make a home there for poor Medora,
who had worn out the patience of all her other relations
just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.
“But Dr. Carver—aren’t you
afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he’s been
staying with you at the Blenkers’.”
She smiled. “Oh, the Carver danger is
over. Dr. Carver is a very clever man.
He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora
is simply a good advertisement as a convert.”
“A convert to what?”
“To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.
But, do you know, they interest me more than the
blind conformity to tradition—somebody
else’s tradition—that I see among
our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered
America only to make it into a copy of another country.”
She smiled across the table. “Do you suppose
Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble
just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”
