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Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing ones duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a mans imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and wondered. . . . What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had bent and bound him? He remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence Leffertss, uttered years ago in that very room: If things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beauforts bastards. It was just what Archers eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing; and nobody wondered or reproved. Even the boys Aunt Janey, who still looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her mothers emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a set from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an Isabey miniature. Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her fathers past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered so obscure an incident in the business life of New York as Beauforts failure, or the fact that after his wifes death he had been quietly married to the notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was subsequently heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he represented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in charge of May Archers sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girls guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archers children, and nobody was surprised when Dallass engagement was announced. Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busybusy with reforms and movements, with fads and fetishes and frivolitiesto bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybodys past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane? Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth. It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. He wondered if it was thus that his sons conducted itself in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufortand decided that it was not. It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different, he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would approve. The difference is that these young people take it for granted that theyre going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldnt. Only, I wonderthe thing ones so certain of in advance: can it ever make ones heart beat as wildly? It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendöme. One of the things he had stipulatedalmost the only one when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris, he shouldnt be made to go to one of the newfangled palaces. |
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