The Age of Innocence Ch. 20: Dinner With M.

Summary

May's great worry in London is which Paris dress to wear. Three months into a wedding-tour she describes to her friends as blissful, she has climbed at Grindelwald, swum at Etretat, smiled cheerfully when Archer pointed south towards Italy, and found London interesting only for its theatres and shops. Archer has stopped trying to change her. There is no use, he decides, in freeing a wife who has not the dimmest notion that she is not free, and it is less trouble to treat May exactly as his friends treat their wives. His intellectual life, he tells himself, will go on outside the home, as it always has.

At Mrs Carfry's chilly drawing-room in South Kensington, May arrives in sky-blue and swansdown, so splendid that her shyness shows only as rosiness. Archer understands that her clothes are her armour, her defence against the unknown. At dinner she grows more stubbornly local the more foreign the company, and the Vicar gives up. But over the wine the nephew's tutor, a thin, ugly, lively Frenchman named Riviere, talks to Archer as no one has since Ned Winsett. He has known the Goncourts, been told by Maupassant not to write, and taken up dull tutoring to keep his intellectual liberty. Then, flushing, he asks whether there might be an opening for him in New York.

Archer cannot picture Riviere in New York, and May settles it for him in the hansom. The little Frenchman? Wasn't he dreadfully common? Common where, Archer asks, and she answers, anywhere but in his schoolroom. He laughs that he will not ask him to dine, and she is astonished he ever meant to. Archer is glad, and sees with a flash of chilling insight that many problems will be solved for him like this, by not being faced. He tells himself the first six months of marriage are always the hardest, and that they will soon rub off each other's angles. But May is already pressing on the very angles he most wants to keep sharp.

In this chapter:Terms Characters Key Quotes Modern Story

Why This Matters

Owning Choices Left to Others

Sometimes the easiest way to make a choice is to let someone else's shrug make it for you. When May laughs at the idea of inviting the Carfrys' tutor to dine, Archer is glad to have the matter settled, because another talk with Riviere would force him to think about New York.

This week, when you drop a plan because someone laughed at it, write down whether you still want it, and if you do, take one small step towards it anyway.

This chapter

Inside the Mind: May Welland

Abroad, May grows more firmly local, until her talk becomes 'a chill to repartee'. Among foreigners she does not stretch; she closes ranks inside herself. M. Riviere, alive with ideas, is to her the kind of man one does not keep up with. Her narrowness is a form of safety, the same safety her family practises at home.

Continue this thoughtA World That Never Says the Thing

Coming Up in Chapter 21

On the Beauforts' bright lawn above the Newport sea, girls in starched muslin step from a tent and loose their arrows at the August archery meeting. Archer watches from the verandah, and the busy guests strike him like children playing in a graveyard. Then Medora Manson flutters out beside him, sighing that marriage is one long sacrifice, as she used to tell her Ellen.

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Chapter 20

Dinner With M. Riviere in London

"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table. In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not "dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in foreign countries. Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to…

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Dinner With M. Riviere in London

Summary

Why This Matters