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In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first ith his mother and sister to call on Mrs Welland, after which he and Mrs Welland and May drove out to old Mrs Manson Mingott's to receive that venerable ancestress's blessing
A visit to Mrs Manson Mingott was always an a man The house in itself was already an historic docuh not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue Those were of the purest 1830, with a griarlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fire-places with black any; whereas old Mrs Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the ott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second E-roo calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence
She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and the rocks frooats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by s seen in Paris Meanwhile, as every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her roole iteeographic isolation
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in ed her from a plump active little wo as vast and august as a natural phenoence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extre to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a sht of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a ott; and around and beloave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious arulls on the surface of the billows