As he moved away he saw Lawrence Lefferts, tall and resplendent, leading his wife up to be introduced; and heard Gertrude Lefferts say, as she beamed on the Countess with her large unperceiving smile:  “But I think we used to go to dancing-school together when we were children—.”  Behind her, waiting their turn to name themselves to the Countess, Archer noticed a number of the recalcitrant couples who had declined to meet her at Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s.  As Mrs. Archer remarked:  when the van der Luydens chose, they knew how to give a lesson.  The wonder was that they chose so seldom.

The young man felt a touch on his arm and saw Mrs. van der Luyden looking down on him from the pure eminence of black velvet and the family diamonds.  “It was good of you, dear Newland, to devote yourself so unselfishly to Madame Olenska.  I told your cousin Henry he must really come to the rescue.”

He was aware of smiling at her vaguely, and she added, as if condescending to his natural shyness:  “I’ve never seen May looking lovelier.  The Duke thinks her the handsomest girl in the room.”

IX.

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 Medora.

It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in.  Small dress-makers, bird-stuffers and “people who wrote” were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden house, at the end of a paved path, in which a writer and journalist called Winsett, whom he used to come across now and then, had mentioned that he lived.  Winsett did not invite people to his house; but he had once pointed it out to Archer in the course of a nocturnal stroll, and the latter had asked himself, with a little shiver, if the humanities were so meanly housed in other capitals.

Madame Olenska’s own dwelling was redeemed from the same appearance only by a little more paint about the window-frames; and as Archer mustered its modest front he said to himself that the Polish Count must have robbed her of her fortune as well as of her illusions.

The young man had spent an unsatisfactory day.  He had lunched with the Wellands, hoping afterward to carry off May for a walk in the Park.  He wanted to have her to himself, to tell her how enchanting she had looked the night before, and how proud he was of her, and to press her to hasten their marriage.  But Mrs. Welland had firmly reminded him that the round of family visits was not half over, and, when he hinted at advancing the date of the wedding, had raised reproachful eye-brows and sighed out:  “Twelve dozen of everything—­hand-embroidered—­”