Chapter 23

XXIII.

The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall
River train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer
Boston. The streets near the station were full of the
smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-
sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate
abandon of boarders going down the passage to
the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club
for breakfast. Even the fashionable quarters had the air
of untidy domesticity to which no excess of heat ever
degrades the European cities. Care-takers in calico
lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the
Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow
of a Masonic picnic. If Archer had tried to imagine
Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not have
called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her
than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning
with a slice of melon, and studying a morning paper
while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs. A
new sense of energy and activity had possessed him
ever since he had announced to May the night before
that he had business in Boston, and should take the
Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the
following evening. It had always been understood that
he would return to town early in the week, and when
he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter
from the office, which fate had conspicuously placed
on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to justify his
sudden change of plan. He was even ashamed of the
ease with which the whole thing had been done: it
reminded him, for an uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence
Lefferts's masterly contrivances for securing his
freedom. But this did not long trouble him, for he was
not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced
over the Commercial Advertiser. While he was thus
engaged two or three men he knew came in, and the
usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world
after all, though he had such a queer sense of having
slipped through the meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch, and finding that it was
half-past nine got up and went into the writing-room.
There he wrote a few lines, and ordered a messenger to
take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the
answer. He then sat down behind another newspaper and
tried to calculate how long it would take a cab to get to
the Parker House.

"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's
voice at his elbow; and he stammered: "Out?--" as if
it were a word in a strange language.

He got up and went into the hall. It must be a
mistake: she could not be out at that