Chapter 2

II.

Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had
been thrown into a strange state of embarrassment.

It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting
the undivided attention of masculine New York
should be that in which his betrothed was seated
between her mother and aunt; and for a moment he
could not identify the lady in the Empire dress, nor
imagine why her presence created such excitement among
the initiated. Then light dawned on him, and with it
came a momentary rush of indignation. No, indeed; no
one would have thought the Mingotts would have tried
it on!

But they had; they undoubtedly had; for the low-
toned comments behind him left no doubt in Archer's
mind that the young woman was May Welland's cousin,
the cousin always referred to in the family as "poor
Ellen Olenska." Archer knew that she had suddenly
arrived from Europe a day or two previously; he had
even heard from Miss Welland (not disapprovingly)
that she had been to see poor Ellen, who was staying
with old Mrs. Mingott. Archer entirely approved of
family solidarity, and one of the qualities he most
admired in the Mingotts was their resolute championship
of the few black sheep that their blameless stock
had produced. There was nothing mean or ungenerous
in the young man's heart, and he was glad that his
future wife should not be restrained by false prudery
from being kind (in private) to her unhappy cousin; but
to receive Countess Olenska in the family circle was a
different thing from producing her in public, at the
Opera of all places, and in the very box with the young
girl whose engagement to him, Newland Archer, was
to be announced within a few weeks. No, he felt as old
Sillerton Jackson felt; he did not think the Mingotts
would have tried it on!

He knew, of course, that whatever man dared (within
Fifth Avenue's limits) that old Mrs. Manson Mingott,
the Matriarch of the line, would dare. He had always
admired the high and mighty old lady, who, in spite of
having been only Catherine Spicer of Staten Island,
with a father mysteriously discredited, and neither money
nor position enough to make people forget it, had
allied herself with the head of the wealthy Mingott line,
married two of her daughters to "foreigners" (an Italian
marquis and an English banker), and put the crowning
touch to her audacities by building a large house of
pale cream-coloured stone (when brown sandstone
seemed as much the only wear as a frock-coat in the
afternoon) in an inaccessible wilderness near the
Central Park.

Old Mrs. Mingott's foreign daughters had become a
legend. They never came back to see their mother, and
the latter being, like many persons of