Page 25 (1/1)

That evening, after Mr Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedrooilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the raphs of fa

As he dropped into his arraph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocentcreature whose soul's custodian he was to be That terrifying product of the social systeirl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at hih May Welland's familiar features; and once e was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set theh his mind His own exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the root of a probleard as non-existent "Nice" woed, would never claienerous-ument--the enerosities were in fact only a huuise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern But here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his oife's part, would justify hi down on her all the thunders of Church and State Of course the dileuard Polish noblehts would be if he WERE

But Newland Archer was too iinative not to feel that, in his case and May's, the tie ross and palpable What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past froirl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed his friends' es--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedoment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his es about him were: a dull association of norance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other