“Thanks. I wish it might happen oftener,” said the visitor in his easy arrogant way. “I’m generally so tied down; but I met the Countess Ellen in Madison Square, and she was good enough to let me walk home with her.”
“Ah–I hope the house will be gayer, now that Ellen’s here!” cried Mrs. Mingott with a glorious effrontery. “Sit down–sit down, Beaufort: push up the yellow armchair; now I’ve got you I want a good gossip. I hear your ball was magnificent; and I understand you invited Mrs. Lemuel Struthers? Well–I’ve a curiosity to see the woman myself.”
She had forgotten her relatives, who were drifting out into the hall under Ellen Olenska’s guidance. Old Mrs. Mingott had always professed a great admiration for Julius Beaufort, and there was a kind of kinship in their cool domineering way and their short-cuts through the conventions. Now she was eagerly curious to know what had decided the Beauforts to invite (for the first time) Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of Struthers’s Shoe-polish, who had returned the previous year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight little citadel of New York. “Of course if you and Regina invite her the thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money–and I hear she’s still very good-looking,” the carnivorous old lady declared.
In the hall, while Mrs. Welland and May drew on their furs, Archer saw that the Countess Olenska was looking at him with a faintly questioning smile.
“Of course you know already–about May and me,” he said, answering her look with a shy laugh. “She scolded me for not giving you the news last night at the Opera: I had her orders to tell you that we were engaged–but I couldn’t, in that crowd.”
The smile passed from Countess Olenska’s eyes to her lips: she looked younger, more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood. “Of course I know; yes. And I’m so glad. But one doesn’t tell such things first in a crowd.” The ladies were on the threshold and she held out her hand.
“Good-bye; come and see me some day,” she said, still looking at Archer.
In the carriage, on the way down Fifth Avenue, they talked pointedly of Mrs. Mingott, of her age, her spirit, and all her wonderful attributes. No one alluded to Ellen Olenska; but Archer knew that Mrs. Welland was thinking: “It’s a mistake for Ellen to be seen, the very day after her arrival, parading up Fifth Avenue at the crowded hour with Julius Beaufort–” and the young man himself mentally added: “And she ought to know that a man who’s just engaged doesn’t spend his time calling on married women. But I daresay in the set she’s lived in they do–they never do anything else.” And, in spite of the cosmopolitan views on which he prided himself, he thanked heaven that he was a New Yorker, and about to ally himself with one of his own kind.
V.
The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the Archers.
Mrs. Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to be well-informed as to its doings. Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson applied to the investigation of his friends’ affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits of minor gossip that filled out usefully the gaps in his picture.
Therefore, whenever anything happened that Mrs. Archer wanted to know about, she asked Mr. Jackson to dine; and as she honoured few people with her invitations, and as she and her daughter Janey were an excellent audience, Mr. Jackson usually came himself instead of sending his sister. If he could have dictated all the conditions, he would have chosen the evenings when Newland was out; not because the young man was uncongenial to him (the two got on capitally at their club) but because the old anecdotist sometimes felt, on Newland’s part, a tendency to weigh his evidence that the ladies of the family never showed.