artless
victim.

Newland Archer, leaning against the wall at the back of the club box,
turned his eyes from the stage and scanned the opposite side of the
house. Directly facing him was the box of old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to
attend the Opera, but who was always represented on fashionable nights
by some of the younger members of the family. On this occasion, the
front of the box was filled by her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Lovell
Mingott, and her daughter, Mrs. Welland; and slightly withdrawn behind
these brocaded matrons sat a young girl in white with eyes ecstatically
fixed on the stagelovers. As Madame Nilsson's "M'ama!" thrilled out
above the silent house (the boxes always stopped talking during the
Daisy Song) a warm pink mounted to the girl's cheek, mantled her brow
to the roots of her fair braids, and suffused the young slope of her
breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker fastened with a
single gardenia. She dropped her eyes to the immense bouquet of
lilies-of-the-valley on her knee, and Newland Archer saw her
white-gloved finger-tips touch the flowers softly. He drew a breath of
satisfied vanity and his eyes returned to the stage.

No expense had been spared on the setting, which was acknowledged to be
very beautiful even by people who shared his acquaintance with the
Opera houses of Paris and Vienna. The foreground, to the footlights,
was covered with emerald green cloth. In the middle distance
symmetrical mounds of woolly green moss bounded by croquet hoops formed
the base of shrubs shaped like orange-trees but studded with large pink
and red roses. Gigantic pansies, considerably larger than the roses,
and closely resembling the floral pen-wipers made by female
parishioners for fashionable clergymen, sprang from the moss beneath
the rose-trees; and here and there a daisy grafted on a rose-branch
flowered with a luxuriance prophetic of Mr. Luther Burbank's far-off
prodigies.

In the centre of this enchanted garden Madame Nilsson, in white
cashmere slashed with pale blue satin, a reticule dangling from a blue
girdle, and large yellow braids carefully disposed on each side of her
muslin chemisette, listened with downcast eyes to M. Capoul's
impassioned wooing, and affected a guileless incomprehension of his
designs whenever, by word or glance, he persuasively indicated the
ground floor window of the neat brick villa projecting o