Chapter 9 - Page 2

in the brief moments when they
were alone he had had more pressing things to say.
Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the
matter. He knew that May most particularly wanted
him to be kind to her cousin; was it not that wish
which had hastened the announcement of their engagement?
It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but
for the Countess's arrival, he might have been, if not
still a free man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged.
But May had willed it so, and he felt himself somehow
relieved of further responsibility--and therefore at liberty,
if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling
her.

As he stood on Madame Olenska's threshold curiosity
was his uppermost feeling. He was puzzled by the
tone in which she had summoned him; he concluded
that she was less simple than she seemed.

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking
maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief,
whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian. She
welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering
his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led
him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-
room. The room was empty, and she left him, for an
appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to
find her mistress, or whether she had not understood
what he was there for, and thought it might be to wind
the clock--of which he perceived that the only visible
specimen had stopped. He knew that the southern races
communicated with each other in the language of
pantomime, and was mortified to find her shrugs and
smiles so unintelligible. At length she returned with a
lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a
phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer:
"La signora e fuori; ma verra subito"; which he took
to mean: "She's out--but you'll soon see."

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp,
was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any
room he had known. He knew that the Countess Olenska
had brought some of her possessions with her--bits of
wreckage, she called them--and these, he supposed,
were represented by some small slender tables of dark
wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-
piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the
discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking
pictures in old frames.

Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of
Italian art. His boyhood had been saturated with
Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books: John Addington
Symonds, Vernon Lee's "Euphorion," the essays of P.
G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called
"The Renaissance" by Walter Pater. He talked easily of
Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico with a