assed
silence: "The same as Rhinebeck? The Patroon's house? But it will be
a hundred thousand times better--won't it, Newland? It's too dear and
kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."

And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their
shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly:
"Only fancy, I've never been inside it--have you? The van der Luydens
show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and
she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it's the only
house she's seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly
happy in."

"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband
gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile: "Ah, it's just our luck
beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"

XX.

"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and
his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental
Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people
whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously
avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not
"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in
foreign countries.

Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so
unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances
of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,
that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a
word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and
railway-stations. Their own compatriots--save those previously known
or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced
disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at
Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage
(whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known
to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle
of liniment. The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--had
been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who
never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately
able to produce