She was
pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any
one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake
up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's
past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered
so obscure an incident in the business life of New
York as Beaufort's failure, or the fact that after his
wife's death he had been quietly married to the notorious
Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new
wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was
subsequently heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia;
and a dozen years later American travellers were
handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where
he represented a large insurance agency. He and his
wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day
their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in
charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland,
whose husband had been appointed the girl's
guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly
relationship with Newland Archer's children, and nobody
was surprised when Dallas's engagement was announced.
Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the
distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays
were too busy--busy with reforms and "movements,"
with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much
about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's
past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the
social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at
the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart
beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.
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