The Escape to Deeper Waters — The Age of Innocence

In a sweltering, shirt-sleeved Boston where he cannot picture Ellen Olenska at all, Archer eats a methodical breakfast at the Somerset Club and sends a note to the Parker House. He told May he had business in town, and a letter from the office made the excuse easy; the ease reminds him uncomfortably of Lawrence Lefferts. The messenger comes back: the lady is out. Then, on the first bench across the Common, there she is under a grey sunshade. How could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?

She is alone, without her maid, and she has just refused to take back a sum of money that was hers. The conditions were 'not onerous', she says: only to sit at the head of her husband's table now and then. The Count's emissary is waiting until evening in case she changes her mind. Archer begs her for the day instead: a steamboat to Point Arley, and he will not open his mouth unless she tells him to. She asks why he did not come down to the shore at Granny's. Because she never looked round, he says. She answers that she knew he was there, and went to the beach to get as far from him as she could. Then he admits that the business he came to Boston for was to find her.

She writes a note on her knee with his new stylographic pen. Outside the Parker House Archer paces and glimpses a pale, quick, foreign face he half remembers, then loses it. Ellen is back in three minutes. On the boat they barely speak; the familiar world recedes with the wharves, and Archer fears that a touch could break the nearness they have found. At the inn a noisy party of school-teachers drives them into a bare private room with a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. Ellen sits down opposite him, faintly amused, as if two old friends with so much to say should naturally want to be alone. The year and a half between them waits on the checkered cloth, still unspoken.