Chapter 12 - Page 2

Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit Fay."
The most celebrated authors of that generation had
been "gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who
succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their
origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with
the stage and the Opera, made any old New York
criterion inapplicable to them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we
knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street;
and only the people one knew had carriages. It was
perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't tell,
and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of
moral prejudices and almost parvenu indifference to
the subtler distinctions, might have bridged the abyss;
but she had never opened a book or looked at a
picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her
of gala nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph
at the Tuileries. Possibly Beaufort, who was her match
in daring, would have succeeded in bringing about a
fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen
were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover,
he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and
considered "fellows who wrote" as the mere paid
purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough
to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever
since he could remember, and had accepted them as
part of the structure of his universe. He knew that
there were societies where painters and poets and
novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were
as sought after as Dukes; he had often pictured to
himself what it would have been to live in the intimacy
of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of Merimee
(whose "Lettres a une Inconnue" was one of his
inseparables), of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris.
But such things were inconceivable in New York, and
unsettling to think of. Archer knew most of the
"fellows who wrote," the musicians and the painters: he
met them at the Century, or at the little musical and
theatrical clubs that were beginning to come into
existence. He enjoyed them there, and was bored with
them at the Blenkers', where they were mingled with
fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like
captured curiosities; and even after his most exciting
talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with the
feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and
that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage
of manners where they would naturally merge.

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the
society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and
suffered, and also--perhaps--tasted mysterious joys.
He