Chapter 6

VI.

That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself
away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-
curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully
to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual,
kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the
room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and
steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the mantelpiece
and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked
singularly home-like and welcoming.

As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes
rested on a large photograph of May Welland, which
the young girl had given him in the first days of their
romance, and which had now displaced all the other
portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he
looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay
innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul's
custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the
social system he belonged to and believed in, the young
girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked
back at him like a stranger through May Welland's
familiar features; and once more it was borne in on
him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had
been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old
settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously
through his mind. His own exclamation: "Women should
be free--as free as we are," struck to the root of a
problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as
non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would
never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-
minded men like himself were therefore--in the heat of
argument--the more chivalrously ready to concede it
to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a
humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that
tied things together and bound people down to the old
pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part
of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that, on his own
wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her
all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the
dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a
blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate
what his wife's rights would be if he WERE. But Newland
Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case
and May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross
and palpable. What could he and she really know of
each other, since it was his duty, as a "decent" fellow,
to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable
girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some
one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of
them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or
irritate each other? He