Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile. “Has
the Duke been carrying her off to parties?”
“You know what these English grandees are.
They’re all alike. Louisa and I are very
fond of our cousin—but it’s hopeless
to expect people who are accustomed to the European
courts to trouble themselves about our little republican
distinctions. The Duke goes where he’s
amused.” Mr. van der Luyden paused, but
no one spoke. “Yes—it seems
he took her with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s.
Sillerton Jackson has just been to us with the foolish
story, and Louisa was rather troubled. So I
thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess
Olenska and explain—by the merest hint,
you know—how we feel in New York about
certain things. I felt I might, without indelicacy,
because the evening she dined with us she rather suggested
. . . rather let me see that she would be grateful
for guidance. And she was.”
Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what
would have been self-satisfaction on features less
purged of the vulgar passions. On his face it
became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer’s
countenance dutifully reflected.
“How kind you both are, dear Henry—always!
Newland will particularly appreciate what you have
done because of dear May and his new relations.”
She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said:
“Immensely, sir. But I was sure you’d
like Madame Olenska.”
Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness.
“I never ask to my house, my dear Newland,”
he said, “any one whom I do not like. And
so I have just told Sillerton Jackson.”
With a glance at the clock he rose and added:
“But Louisa will be waiting. We are dining
early, to take the Duke to the Opera.”
After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their
visitor a silence fell upon the Archer family.
“Gracious—how romantic!” at
last broke explosively from Janey. No one knew
exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her
relations had long since given up trying to interpret
them.
Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh. “Provided
it all turns out for the best,” she said, in
the tone of one who knows how surely it will not.
“Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson
when he comes this evening: I really shan’t
know what to say to him.”
“Poor mother! But he won’t come—”
her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown.
Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in
abstracted idleness in his private compartment of
the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys
at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.
Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser
of three generations of New York gentility, throned
behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity.
As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and
ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above
his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner
thought how much he looked like the Family Physician
annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be
classified.
