The Ritual of Engagement Visits — The Age of Innocence

Old Mrs Manson Mingott sits at her ground-floor window like a natural wonder, waves of black silk spilling over her armchair and two tiny white hands resting on top. Too heavy for the stairs, she has moved her bedroom downstairs, and visitors glimpse a huge low bed through an open door. New York thinks of French novels and adultery. Archer enjoys picturing her blameless life on the stage set of a scandal, and decides that if she had wanted a lover, she would have had one.

The betrothal visit goes as planned. She admires the thick sapphire, remarks that May's hand is large but white, and dismisses Mrs Welland's proper show of reluctance about a long engagement. "Know each other? Fiddlesticks!" Everybody in New York has always known everybody. She wants them married before Lent, so that she can give the wedding breakfast before pneumonia carries her off.

Then Ellen walks in with Julius Beaufort, who met her in Madison Square, and the old lady forgets her family for a good gossip about his ball and Mrs Lemuel Struthers. In the hall Ellen tells Archer she is glad, and adds gently that one does not tell such things first in a crowd, the very feeling he had at the ball. She asks him to come and see her some day. In the carriage nobody mentions her. Mrs Welland is thinking about Ellen parading up Fifth Avenue with Beaufort; Archer is thinking that an engaged man does not spend his time calling on married women. He forgets his cosmopolitan pride, thanks heaven that he is a New Yorker marrying one of his own kind, and rides on down Fifth Avenue.