He could not picture May Welland, in whatever
conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties
and lavishing her confidences on strange men; and
she had never seemed to him finer or fairer than in the
week that followed. He had even yielded to her wish
for a long engagement, since she had found the one
disarming answer to his plea for haste.

"You know, when it comes to the point, your parents
have always let you have your way ever since you
were a little girl," he argued; and she had answered,
with her clearest look: "Yes; and that's what makes it
so hard to refuse the very last thing they'll ever ask of
me as a little girl."

That was the old New York note; that was the kind
of answer he would like always to be sure of his wife's
making. If one had habitually breathed the New York
air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed
stifling.


The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much
in fact; but they plunged him into an atmosphere in
which he choked and spluttered. They consisted mainly
of an exchange of letters between Count Olenski's
solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess
had applied for the settlement of her financial
situation. There was also a short letter from the Count to
his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer rose, jammed