"We DID use to play together, didn't we?" she asked,
turning her grave eyes to his. "You were a horrid boy,
and kissed me once behind a door; but it was your
cousin Vandie Newland, who never looked at me, that
I was in love with." Her glance swept the horse-shoe
curve of boxes. "Ah, how this brings it all back to
me--I see everybody here in knickerbockers and pantalettes,"
she said, with her trailing slightly foreign accent,
her eyes returning to his face.

Agreeable as their expression was, the young man
was shocked that they should reflect so unseemly a
picture of the august tribunal before which, at that very
moment, her case was being tried. Nothing could be in
worse taste than misplaced flippancy; and he answered
somewhat stiffly: "Yes, you have been away a very
long time."

"Oh, centuries and centuries; so long," she said,
"that I'm sure I'm dead and buried, and this dear old
place is heaven;" which, for reasons he could not
define, struck Newland Archer as an even more
disrespectful way of describing New York society.



III.

It invariably happened in the same way.