ill-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a
miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave
after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious
armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of
the billows.

The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott's flesh had long since made it
impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic
independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established
herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the
ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room
window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a
looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a bedroom
with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with
frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.

Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this
arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural
incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed
of. That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies,
in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent
propinquities that their novels described. It amused Newland Archer
(who had secretly situated the love-scenes of "Monsieur de Camors" in
Mrs. Mingott's bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the
stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable
admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid
woman would have had him too.

To the general relief the Countess Olenska was not present in her
grandmother's drawing-room during the visit of the betrothed couple.
Mrs. Mingott said she had gone out; which, on a day of such glaring
sunlight, and at the "shopping hour," seemed in itself an indelicate
thing for a compromised woman to do. But at any rate it spared them
the embarrassment of her presence, and the faint shadow that her
unhappy past might seem to shed on their radiant future. The visit
went off successfully, as was to have been expected. Old Mrs. Mingott
was delighted with the engagement, which, being long foreseen by
watchful relatives, had been carefully passed upon in family council;
and the engagement ring, a large thick sapphire set in invisible claws,
met with her unqualified admiration.

"It's the new setting: of course it shows the sto