Orakel Classics
The Age of Innocence
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, prepared as a public-domain Orakel edition with 34 chapter-aware companion links.
Chapters
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I. from The Age of Innocence. On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New
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II. from The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a strange state of
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III. from The Age of Innocence. Mrs. Julius Beaufort, on the night of her annual ball, never failed to appear at the Opera; indeed, she always gave her ball on an Opera night in order to emphasise her complete superiority to household cares, and her possession of a staff of servants competent to organise every detail of the entertainment in her
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IV. from The Age of Innocence. In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged. The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs. Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that venerable ancestress's
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V. from The Age of Innocence. Mrs. Archer was a shy woman and shrank from society; but she liked to be well-informed as to its doings. Her old friend Mr. Sillerton Jackson applied to the investigation of his friends' affairs the patience of a collector and the science of a naturalist; and his sister, Miss Sophy Jackson, who lived with him, and was entertained by all the people who could not secure her much-sought-after brother, brought home bits
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VI. from The Age of Innocence. That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked
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VII. from The Age of Innocence. Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to her cousin Mrs. Archer's
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VIII. from The Age of Innocence. It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had "lost her
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IX. from The Age of Innocence. The Countess Olenska had said "after five"; and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired, far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond
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X. from The Age of Innocence. The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk in the Park after luncheon. As was the custom in old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons; but Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that very morning won her over to the necessity of a long engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered trousseau containing the proper number of
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XI. from The Age of Innocence. Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the
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XII. from The Age of Innocence. Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and the habit of after-dinner calls, though derided in Archer's set, still generally prevailed. As the young man strolled up Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place, the long thoroughfare was deserted but for a group of carriages standing before the Reggie Chiverses' (where there was a dinner for the Duke), and the occasional figure of an elderly gentleman in heavy overcoat and
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XIII. from The Age of Innocence. The play was "The Shaughraun," with Dion Boucicault in the title role and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers. The popularity of the admirable English company was at its height, and the Shaughraun always packed the house. In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved; in the stalls and boxes, people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations, and enjoyed the play as much as the
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XIV. from The Age of Innocence. As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett, the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of club and chop-house
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XV. from The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses' on Friday evening, and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a week-end at
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XVI. from The Age of Innocence. When Archer walked down the sandy main street of St. Augustine to the house which had been pointed out to him as Mr. Welland's, and saw May Welland standing under a magnolia with the sun in her hair, he wondered why he had waited so long to
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XVII. from The Age of Innocence. "Your cousin the Countess called on mother while you were away," Janey Archer announced to her brother on the evening of his
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XVIII. from The Age of Innocence. "What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?" Madame Olenska cried as she came into the
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XIX. from The Age of Innocence. The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust. All the old ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the
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XX. from The Age of Innocence. "Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging house
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XXI. from The Age of Innocence. The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked
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XXII. from The Age of Innocence. Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high
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XXIII. from The Age of Innocence. The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston. The streets near the station were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the
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XXIV. from The Age of Innocence. They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she
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XXV. from The Age of Innocence. Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained
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XXVI. from The Age of Innocence. Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of
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XXVII. from The Age of Innocence. Wall Street, the next day, had more reassuring reports of Beaufort's situation. They were not definite, but they were hopeful. It was generally understood that he could call on powerful influences in case of emergency, and that he had done so with success; and that evening, when Mrs. Beaufort appeared at the Opera wearing her old smile and a new emerald necklace, society drew a breath of
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XXVIII. from The Age of Innocence. "Ol--ol--howjer spell it, anyhow?" asked the tart young lady to whom Archer had pushed his wife's telegram across the brass ledge of the Western Union
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XXIX. from The Age of Innocence. His wife's dark blue brougham (with the wedding varnish still on it) met Archer at the ferry, and conveyed him luxuriously to the Pennsylvania terminus in Jersey
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XXX. from The Age of Innocence. That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the drawing-room
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XXXI. from The Age of Innocence. Archer had been stunned by old Catherine's news. It was only natural that Madame Olenska should have hastened from Washington in response to her grandmother's summons; but that she should have decided to remain under her roof--especially now that Mrs. Mingott had almost regained her health--was less easy to
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XXXII. from The Age of Innocence. "At the court of the Tuileries," said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his reminiscent smile, "such things were pretty openly
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XXXIII. from The Age of Innocence. It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big
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XXXIV. from The Age of Innocence. Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East Thirty-ninth
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