M. Riviere bowed and drew back a step.
“Thank you,” Archer said again, as their
hands met.
Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue
opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung
up its triple layer of window-curtains.
By the first of November this household ritual was
over, and society had begun to look about and take
stock of itself. By the fifteenth the season
was in full blast, Opera and theatres were putting
forth their new attractions, dinner-engagements were
accumulating, and dates for dances being fixed.
And punctually at about this time Mrs. Archer always
said that New York was very much changed.
Observing it from the lofty stand-point of a non-participant,
she was able, with the help of Mr. Sillerton Jackson
and Miss Sophy, to trace each new crack in its surface,
and all the strange weeds pushing up between the ordered
rows of social vegetables. It had been one of
the amusements of Archer’s youth to wait for
this annual pronouncement of his mother’s, and
to hear her enumerate the minute signs of disintegration
that his careless gaze had overlooked. For New
York, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, never changed without
changing for the worse; and in this view Miss Sophy
Jackson heartily concurred.
Mr. Sillerton Jackson, as became a man of the world,
suspended his judgment and listened with an amused
impartiality to the lamentations of the ladies.
But even he never denied that New York had changed;
and Newland Archer, in the winter of the second year
of his marriage, was himself obliged to admit that
if it had not actually changed it was certainly changing.
These points had been raised, as usual, at Mrs. Archer’s
Thanksgiving dinner. At the date when she was
officially enjoined to give thanks for the blessings
of the year it was her habit to take a mournful though
not embittered stock of her world, and wonder what
there was to be thankful for. At any rate, not
the state of society; society, if it could be said
to exist, was rather a spectacle on which to call
down Biblical imprecations— and in fact,
every one knew what the Reverend Dr. Ashmore meant
when he chose a text from Jeremiah (chap. ii., verse
25) for his Thanksgiving sermon. Dr. Ashmore,
the new Rector of St. Matthew’s, had been chosen
because he was very “advanced”: his
sermons were considered bold in thought and novel in
language. When he fulminated against fashionable
society he always spoke of its “trend”;
and to Mrs. Archer it was terrifying and yet fascinating
to feel herself part of a community that was trending.
“There’s no doubt that Dr. Ashmore is
right: there is a marked trend,” she
said, as if it were something visible and measurable,
like a crack in a house.
“It was odd, though, to preach about it on Thanksgiving,”
Miss Jackson opined; and her hostess drily rejoined:
“Oh, he means us to give thanks for what’s
left.”
