Chapter 13

XIII.

It was a crowded night at Wallack's theatre.

The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion
Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and
Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the admirable
English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun
always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm
was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people
smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-
trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the
galleries did.

There was one episode, in particular, that held the
house from floor to ceiling. It was that in which Harry
Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of
parting with Miss Dyas, bade her good-bye, and turned
to go. The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece
and looking down into the fire, wore a gray
cashmere dress without fashionable loopings or trimmings,
moulded to her tall figure and flowing in long
lines about her feet. Around her neck was a narrow
black velvet ribbon with the ends falling down her
back.

When her wooer turned from her she rested her arms
against the mantel-shelf and bowed her face in her
hands. On the threshold he paused to look at her; then
he stole back, lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon,
kissed it, and left the room without her hearing him or
changing her attitude. And on this silent parting the
curtain fell.

It was always for the sake of that particular scene
that Newland Archer went to see "The Shaughraun."
He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as
fine as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant
do in Paris, or Madge Robertson and Kendal in London;
in its reticence, its dumb sorrow, it moved him
more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.

On the evening in question the little scene acquired
an added poignancy by reminding him--he could not
have said why--of his leave-taking from Madame
Olenska after their confidential talk a week or ten days
earlier.

It would have been as difficult to discover any
resemblance between the two situations as between the
appearance of the persons concerned. Newland Archer
could not pretend to anything approaching the young
English actor's romantic good looks, and Miss Dyas
was a tall red-haired woman of monumental build
whose pale and pleasantly ugly face was utterly unlike
Ellen Olenska's vivid countenance. Nor were Archer
and Madame Olenska two lovers parting in heart-broken
silence; they were client and lawyer separating
after a talk which had given the lawyer the worst
possible impression of the client's case. Wherein, then,
lay the resemblance that made the young man's heart
beat with a kind of retrospective