Back on the boat among strangers, Archer feels almost humiliatingly calm. He never touched Ellen's hand with his lips or won a promise of another meeting, and yet he is sure he saved more than he gave up. Sitting in the empty club library, he works out the terms: Ellen will go back to Europe only if she becomes a temptation to him. Keeping her near, and safe, depends on him alone. The golden haze lasts all the way to New York, until a face in the station crowd pulls him out of it.
It is the pale, foreign face he glimpsed outside the Parker House, and it belongs to Riviere, the Carfrys' French tutor he met in London. That afternoon Riviere comes to the office and admits he is on a 'special mission'. In a flash Archer joins the two meetings: Riviere is Count Olenski's emissary. Archer flares up, sure that the whole family stands with Ellen against her husband, then learns he has no idea what the family thinks. Riviere has already talked with Lovell Mingott, and the family now doubts it has the right to advise Ellen to refuse. Nobody told Archer. He remembers May wondering on the drive home from the archery meeting whether Ellen would be happier with her husband, and that she has not spoken Ellen's name since. The tribe tested him, judged he was no longer on its side, and quietly left him out.
Riviere's plea is the opposite of his errand: do not let her go back. He put the Count's offers faithfully, but two talks with Ellen changed his mind. She has turned out to be an American, he says, and for her kind, things other societies put up with become simply unthinkable. He will leave the Count's service when he returns, though he has ill and older relatives depending on him. Archer, staring at the President's face on the office calendar, can only say thank you, twice. The one man pleading for Ellen to stay is her husband's paid messenger. The family that loves her is quietly working to send her back to him.
Coming Up in Chapter 26
Every year on the fifteenth of October, Fifth Avenue opens its shutters and hangs up its triple layer of curtains. At Mrs Archer's Thanksgiving dinner, she and Miss Sophy Jackson count the cracks in society: Paris dresses worn straight from the Custom House, and Dr Ashmore's daring sermon on the 'trend'.
