Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Selfridge Merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic felicity.
It was only natural that Madame Olenska should have hastened from Washington in response to her grandmother's summons; but that she should have decided to remain under her roof especially now that Mrs. Mingott had almost regained her health was less easy to explain. Archer was sure that Madame Olenska's decision had not been influenced by the change in her financial situation.
The one thing he had not counted on, in entering Madame Olenska's hall, was to find hats and overcoats there. Why had she bidden him to come early if she was having people to dine? On a closer inspection of the garments besides which Nastasia was laying his own, his resentment gave way to curiosity.
He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with the main incidents of her life in the interval.
"Well I have it on pretty good authority in fact, on old Catherine's herself that the family reduced Countess Olenska's allowance considerably when she definitely refused to go back to her husband; and as, by this refusal, she also forfeits the money settled on her when she married which Olenski was ready to make over to her if she returned why, what the devil do YOU mean, my dear boy, by asking me what I mean?"
The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed into a polite grimace; and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly "tidied," and prepared, by a judicious distribution of ash-trays and cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in. "Ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long " and he went on to his dressing-room. Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.
Mr. Jackson good-humouredly retorted. Archer moved toward the mantelpiece and bent over to knock his ashes into the grate. "I don't know anything of Madame Olenska's private affairs; but I don't need to, to be certain that what you insinuate " "Oh, I don't: it's Lefferts, for one," Mr. Jackson interposed. "Lefferts who made love to her and got snubbed for it!" Archer broke out contemptuously.
Ah, here's May arriving, and you will want to hurry away to her," she added, but without moving; and her eyes turned back from the door to rest on the young man's face. The drawing-rooms were beginning to fill up with after-dinner guests, and following Madame Olenska's glance Archer saw May Welland entering with her mother.
"Of course you know already about May and me," he said, answering her look with a shy laugh. "She scolded me for not giving you the news last night at the Opera: I had her orders to tell you that we were engaged but I couldn't, in that crowd." The smile passed from Countess Olenska's eyes to her lips: she looked younger, more like the bold brown Ellen Mingott of his boyhood.
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here, what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box of yours with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts seems so smitten by." Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking