Ellen's Return to New York Society — The Age of Innocence

New York has agreed that the Countess Olenska has "lost her looks", and the town's memory of her explains the verdict. She first came as an orphan of nine or ten with her wandering aunt Medora Manson, wearing crimson merino and amber beads when she should have been in black. She danced a Spanish shawl dance, sang Neapolitan love-songs to a guitar, and learned "drawing from the model". Then came a marriage to an immensely rich Polish nobleman met at a ball at the Tuileries, and now its disaster.

At the van der Luydens' dinner for the Duke of St Austrey she arrives late, one hand still ungloved, fastening a bracelet, and enters without haste. Archer rejects the general verdict on the spot. She is thin and worn and nearly thirty, yet she carries a quiet, trained authority that makes the plump elderly faces above their diamond necklaces look immature. The Duke, the evening's great prize, turns out shabby, bearded and almost silent. After dinner he and Ellen talk for twenty minutes in a corner. Then she breaks a rule every New York lady knows: she gets up and crosses the room alone to sit beside Archer.

She calls the Duke the dullest man she ever met, then asks whether Archer is very much in love and whether the match was arranged for him. He reminds her that in his country marriages are not arranged, and she blushes. She forgets, she says, that what was bad where she came from is good here. As May enters in white and silver, like a Diana just alight from the chase, Ellen touches his knee with her plumed fan and asks him to stay a little longer. When Mr van der Luyden brings old Mr Urban Dagonet over, she bids Archer goodbye with an appointment he never made: tomorrow, after five, she will expect him. Behind her, the couples who refused the Lovell Mingotts now queue to be introduced. Mrs van der Luyden thanks Archer for devoting himself so unselfishly to Madame Olenska, and he smiles vaguely, already holding an appointment for tomorrow that nobody else in the room has heard.