“May dear, I have at last made Granny understand
that my visit to her could be no more than a visit;
and she has been as kind and generous as ever.
She sees now that if I return to Europe I must live
by myself, or rather with poor Aunt Medora, who is
coming with me. I am hurrying back to Washington
to pack up, and we sail next week. You must
be very good to Granny when I’m gone—as
good as you’ve always been to me. Ellen.
“If any of my friends wish to urge me to change
my mind, please tell them it would be utterly useless.”
Archer read the letter over two or three times; then
he flung it down and burst out laughing.
The sound of his laugh startled him. It recalled
Janey’s midnight fright when she had caught
him rocking with incomprehensible mirth over May’s
telegram announcing that the date of their marriage
had been advanced.
“Why did she write this?” he asked, checking
his laugh with a supreme effort.
May met the question with her unshaken candour.
“I suppose because we talked things over yesterday—”
“What things?”
“I told her I was afraid I hadn’t been
fair to her— hadn’t always understood
how hard it must have been for her here, alone among
so many people who were relations and yet strangers;
who felt the right to criticise, and yet didn’t
always know the circumstances.” She paused.
“I knew you’d been the one friend she
could always count on; and I wanted her to know that
you and I were the same—in all our feelings.”
She hesitated, as if waiting for him to speak, and
then added slowly: “She understood my wishing
to tell her this. I think she understands everything.”
She went up to Archer, and taking one of his cold
hands pressed it quickly against her cheek.
“My head aches too; good-night, dear,”
she said, and turned to the door, her torn and muddy
wedding-dress dragging after her across the room.
It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland,
a great event for a young couple to give their first
big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their
household, had received a good deal of company in an
informal way. Archer was fond of having three
or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with
the beaming readiness of which her mother had set
her the example in conjugal affairs. Her husband
questioned whether, if left to herself, she would
ever have asked any one to the house; but he had long
given up trying to disengage her real self from the
shape into which tradition and training had moulded
her. It was expected that well-off young couples
in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining,
and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged
to the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed
footmen, with Roman punch, roses from Henderson’s,
and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair,
and not to be lightly undertaken. As Mrs. Archer
remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference;
not in itself but by its manifold implications—since
it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin, two
soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full decolletage with
short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.
