ve it is suggested; but she denies it."

"Then--"

"Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers?
Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my
opinion."

Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents. Since their
last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in
ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska. His hour alone with
her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which
the Duke of St. Austrey's intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the
Countess's joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken.
Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement
in the van der Luydens' favour, and had said to himself, with a touch
of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly
gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need
either the private consolations or the public championship of a young
man of his small compass. To look at the matter in this light
simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim
domestic virtues. He could not picture May Welland, in whatever
conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and
lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed to
him finer or fairer than in the week that followed. He had even
yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one
disarming answer to his plea for haste.

"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you
have your way ever since you were a little girl," he argued; and she
had answered, with her clearest look: "Yes; and that's what makes it
so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of me as a
little girl."

That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would
like always to be sure of his wife's making. If one had habitually
breathed the New York air there were times when anything less
crystalline seemed stifling.

The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but
they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered.
They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's
solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied for
the settlement of her financial situation. There was also a short
letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer
rose, jammed the papers back into their e