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Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East Thirty-ninth Street

He had just got back froalleries at the Metropolitan Museureat spaces croith the spoils of the ages, where the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory

"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola roo about hi alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure in a long sealskin cloak rely-fitted vista of the old Museum

The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary s and of all the family confabulations

It was the roos of his life had happened There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to hi circueneration to smile, the news that she was to have a child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop of New York, the a the pride and ornaered across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse laughed behind the door; there their second child, Mary (as so like her eie Chivers'sveil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled on its foundations the "Grace Church wedding" reed institution

It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishue leanings toward "art" which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect

The youngthe up all sorts of new things If they were not absorbed in state politics orin for Central A; taking a keen and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the less use of the word "Colonial" Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the rocers of the suburbs