On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances...

On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances...

Newland Archer, during this brief episode, had been thrown into a strange state of embarrassment. It was annoying that the box which was thus attracting the undivided attention of masculine New York s...

It invariably happened in the same way. 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 empha...

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 wen...

The next evening old Mr. Sillerton Jackson came to dine with the Archers. 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. Si...

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 usua...

Mrs. Henry van der Luyden listened in silence to her cousin Mrs. Archer’s narrative. It was all very well to tell yourself in advance that Mrs. van der Luyden was always silent, and that, though nonco...

It was generally agreed in New York that the Countess Olenska had “lost her looks.” She had appeared there first, in Newland Archer’s boyhood, as a brilliantly pretty little girl of nine or ten, of wh...

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...

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 afterno...

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 firm. Ol...

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, th...

It was a crowded night at Wallack’s theatre. 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 ...

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 averag...

Newland Archer arrived at the Chiverses’ on Friday evening, and on Saturday went conscientiously through all the rites appertaining to a weekend at Highbank. In the morning he had a spin in the iceboa...

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, ...

“Your cousin the Countess called on mother while you were away,” Janey Archer announced to her brother on the evening of his return. The young man, who was dining alone with his mother and sister, gla...

“What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?” Madame Olenska cried as she came into the room. She was dressed as if for a ball. Everything about her shimmered and glimmered softly, as if her dres...

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...

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...

“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 breakfast-table. In all th...

The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea. The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at inter...

“A party for the Blenkers⁠—the Blenkers?” Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her gold eyeglasses, rea...

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 an...

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 du...

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others, Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as much as it sustained him. The day, according to any current valuation, had been a rather ri...

Every year on the fifteenth of October Fifth Avenue opened its shutters, unrolled its carpets and hung up its triple layer of window-curtains. By the first of November this household ritual was over, ...

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 ...

“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 office. “Olenska⁠—O-len-ska,” he repeated, drawin...

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 City. It was a sombre snowy afternoon,...

That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the drawing-room empty. He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott’s illness; an...

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...

“At the court of the Tuileries,” said Mr. Sillerton Jackson with his reminiscent smile, “such things were pretty openly tolerated.” The scene was the van der Luydens’ black walnut dining-room in Madis...

It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner. The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good ...

Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East Thirty-ninth Street. He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Mus...