The Choice to Remember — The Age of Innocence

Someone at the opening of the new Metropolitan galleries says, "Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," and Archer is back on the hard leather divan, watching a slight figure in a sealskin cloak move away. At home in his library in East Thirty-ninth Street, he counts what has happened in that room over thirty years: May's blushing news of their first child, Dallas christened there by the Bishop, Mary's engagement to the dullest of the Chivers sons, the evening the Governor of New York banged the table and said men like Archer were what the country wanted. Archer served a year in the State Assembly, was not re-elected, and became the man people meant when they said, "Ask Archer." He knows what he missed, the flower of life, and thinks of it now like a lottery prize that was never likely to be his. May died of the pneumonia she caught nursing their youngest child, and he honestly mourned her. Her photograph still stands by his inkstand: generous, faithful, and blind to every change around her.

The telephone brings Dallas's voice from Chicago, as near as if he sat by the fire. He wants his father to sail with him on the Mauretania next Wednesday, because it will be their last time together in this way: on the fifth he marries Fanny Beaufort. Archer has lost the habit of travel. Pacing the room, he sees how deep his rut is, and that the worst of doing one's duty is that it seems to unfit a man for anything else. Lawrence Lefferts's old prophecy about children marrying Beaufort's bastards has come true in Archer's own son, and nobody wonders or reproves. Aunt Janey has carried her mother's emeralds to the bride with her own twitching hands.

In Paris, at a hotel window over the Place Vendome, Dallas mentions lightly that the Countess Olenska expects them both at half-past five. Then he asks what she was like, and whether she was the woman his father would have chucked everything for, only he didn't. He repeats what May told him the day before she died: the children were safe with their father, because once, when she asked him to, he gave up the thing he most wanted. "She never asked me," Archer says. Dallas jokes that his parents never asked each other anything. Alone that afternoon, Archer is moved to learn that someone guessed and pitied, and that it was his wife. In the Louvre, before a Titian, he catches himself saying he is only fifty-seven.

At dusk father and son reach the Invalides, whose golden dome lights the quarter where Ellen has lived for nearly thirty years among people Archer never knew. Dallas finds the house: fifth floor, the balcony with the awnings. Archer sits down on a bench and sends his son up alone. He pictures the room, the azaleas, a pale dark lady holding out a long thin hand with three rings, and tells himself it is more real to him there than if he went up. A light comes on. A man-servant draws up the awnings and closes the shutters, and Newland Archer "got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel."