The Pursuit and the Flight — The Age of Innocence

A red cloak flashes across the snow with a big dog barking at its heels, and for a moment Ellen looks like the Ellen Mingott of old days. Archer has spent Saturday at Highbank on ice-boats, horse talk and a pillow-fight in the small hours, then borrowed a cutter on Sunday to find her. She will not say what she ran away from. She says May asked him to take care of her, says the women here never seem to feel the need any more than the blessed in heaven, and when he asks what need, tells him she doesn't speak his language. In the old Patroon's stone house, with a fire lit and the Delft plates shining, she says she cannot feel unhappy when he is there.

Archer moves to the window so that whatever happens will happen with the whole room between them. He waits, imagining her light arms round his neck, and sees instead a heavily coated man coming up the path: Julius Beaufort. Archer bursts out laughing. "So that was it?" he says, though she has just murmured that she did not know Beaufort was there. He draws away from her hand, throws open the door, and calls out that Madame Olenska was expecting him.

Travelling back to New York, Archer argues Beaufort's case with painful fairness. Beaufort is vulgar and purse-proud, yet he speaks the language of the wider world Ellen came from, and what once charmed her might charm her still. That night Archer opens his box of London books, Herbert Spencer, Daudet, "Middlemarch," and cannot read them, until a small volume called "The House of Life" fills the night with a woman who has Ellen's face. By morning the brownstones and the family pew at Grace Church have made it all improbable again. The days that follow taste of cinders. Then a note: "Come late tomorrow: I must explain to you. Ellen." He rereads it through an agitated night, and in the morning he pitches some clothes into a portmanteau and makes for the afternoon boat to St Augustine.