Packed in the family landau they rolled from one tribal doorstep to another, and Archer, when the afternoon’s round was over, parted from his betrothed with the feeling that he had been shown off like a wild animal cunningly trapped.  He supposed that his readings in anthropology caused him to take such a coarse view of what was after all a simple and natural demonstration of family feeling; but when he remembered that the Wellands did not expect the wedding to take place till the following autumn, and pictured what his life would be till then, a dampness fell upon his spirit.

“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Welland called after him, “we’ll do the Chiverses and the Dallases”; and he perceived that she was going through their two families alphabetically, and that they were only in the first quarter of the alphabet.

He had meant to tell May of the Countess Olenska’s request—­her command, rather—­that he should call on her that afternoon; but in the brief moments when they were alone he had had more pressing things to say.  Besides, it struck him as a little absurd to allude to the matter.  He knew that May most particularly wanted him to be kind to her cousin; was it not that wish which had hastened the announcement of their engagement?  It gave him an odd sensation to reflect that, but for the Countess’s arrival, he might have been, if not still a free man, at least a man less irrevocably pledged.  But May had willed it so, and he felt himself somehow relieved of further responsibility—­and therefore at liberty, if he chose, to call on her cousin without telling her.

As he stood on Madame Olenska’s threshold curiosity was his uppermost feeling.  He was puzzled by the tone in which she had summoned him; he concluded that she was less simple than she seemed.

The door was opened by a swarthy foreign-looking maid, with a prominent bosom under a gay neckerchief, whom he vaguely fancied to be Sicilian.  She welcomed him with all her white teeth, and answering his enquiries by a head-shake of incomprehension led him through the narrow hall into a low firelit drawing-room.  The room was empty, and she left him, for an appreciable time, to wonder whether she had gone to find her mistress, or whether she had not understood what he was there for, and thought it might be to wind the clock—­of which he perceived that the only visible specimen had stopped.  He knew that the southern races communicated with each other in the language of pantomime, and was mortified to find her shrugs and smiles so unintelligible.  At length she returned with a lamp; and Archer, having meanwhile put together a phrase out of Dante and Petrarch, evoked the answer:  “La signora e fuori; ma verra subito”; which he took to mean:  “She’s out—­but you’ll soon see.”

What he saw, meanwhile, with the help of the lamp, was the faded shadowy charm of a room unlike any room he had known.  He knew that the Countess Olenska had brought some of her possessions with her—­bits of wreckage, she called them—­and these, he supposed, were represented by some small slender tables of dark wood, a delicate little Greek bronze on the chimney-piece, and a stretch of red damask nailed on the discoloured wallpaper behind a couple of Italian-looking pictures in old frames.