The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic.He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from.Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that--categories like that--won't exist.Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter."She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh.
"Oh, my dear--where is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the phrase she had used a little while before.
"Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears," he said.
"Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people.What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.Isn't there a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be.Ah, believe me, it's a miserable little country!"The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May's sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky trotter.Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.
"For US? But there's no US in that sense! We're near each other only if we stay far from each other.Then we can be ourselves.Otherwise we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.""Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No, you're not! You've never been beyond.And Ihave," she said, in a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain.Then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to the coachman.He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to stop.He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone.
"Why are we stopping? This is not Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.
"No: I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping to the pavement.By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him.He closed the door, and leaned for a moment in the window.
"You're right: I ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should not hear.She bent forward, and seemed about to speak;but he had already called out the order to drive on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner.
The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing.Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.
