member, and had accepted them as part of the structure of his
universe. He knew that there were societies where painters and poets
and novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were as sought
after as Dukes; he had often pictured to himself what it would have
been to live in the intimacy of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of
Merimee (whose "Lettres a une Inconnue" was one of his inseparables),
of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris. But such things were
inconceivable in New York, and unsettling to think of. Archer knew
most of the "fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he met
them at the Century, or at the little musical and theatrical clubs that
were beginning to come into existence. He enjoyed them there, and was
bored with them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with fervid
and dowdy women who passed them about like captured curiosities; and
even after his most exciting talks with Ned Winsett he always came away
with the feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and that
the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage of manners where
they would naturally merge.

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the society in which the
Countess Olenska had lived and suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted
mysterious joys. He remembered with what amusement she had told him
that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her living in
a "Bohemian" quarter given over to "people who wrote." It was not the
peril but the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade escaped
her, and she supposed they considered literature compromising.

She herself had no fears of it, and the books scattered about her
drawing-room (a part of the house in which books were usually supposed
to be "out of place"), though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted
Archer's interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,
Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers. Ruminating on these things as he
approached her door, he was once more conscious of the curious way in
which she reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself into
conditions incredibly different from any that he knew if he were to be
of use in her present difficulty.

Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously. On the bench in the
hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a folded opera hat of dull silk with a
gold J. B. on the lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no
mistaking the fact that these costly artic