Newland Archer prided himself on his knowledge of Italian art.  His boyhood had been saturated with Ruskin, and he had read all the latest books:  John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee’s “Euphorion,” the essays of P. G. Hamerton, and a wonderful new volume called “The Renaissance” by Walter Pater.  He talked easily of Botticelli, and spoke of Fra Angelico with a faint condescension.  But these pictures bewildered him, for they were like nothing that he was accustomed to look at (and therefore able to see) when he travelled in Italy; and perhaps, also, his powers of observation were impaired by the oddness of finding himself in this strange empty house, where apparently no one expected him.  He was sorry that he had not told May Welland of Countess Olenska’s request, and a little disturbed by the thought that his betrothed might come in to see her cousin.  What would she think if she found him sitting there with the air of intimacy implied by waiting alone in the dusk at a lady’s fireside?

But since he had come he meant to wait; and he sank into a chair and stretched his feet to the logs.

It was odd to have summoned him in that way, and then forgotten him; but Archer felt more curious than mortified.  The atmosphere of the room was so different from any he had ever breathed that self-consciousness vanished in the sense of adventure.  He had been before in drawing-rooms hung with red damask, with pictures “of the Italian school”; what struck him was the way in which Medora Manson’s shabby hired house, with its blighted background of pampas grass and Rogers statuettes, had, by a turn of the hand, and the skilful use of a few properties, been transformed into something intimate, “foreign,” subtly suggestive of old romantic scenes and sentiments.  He tried to analyse the trick, to find a clue to it in the way the chairs and tables were grouped, in the fact that only two Jacqueminot roses (of which nobody ever bought less than a dozen) had been placed in the slender vase at his elbow, and in the vague pervading perfume that was not what one put on handkerchiefs, but rather like the scent of some far-off bazaar, a smell made up of Turkish coffee and ambergris and dried roses.

His mind wandered away to the question of what May’s drawing-room would look like.  He knew that Mr. Welland, who was behaving “very handsomely,” already had his eye on a newly built house in East Thirty-ninth Street.  The neighbourhood was thought remote, and the house was built in a ghastly greenish-yellow stone that the younger architects were beginning to employ as a protest against the brownstone of which the uniform hue coated New York like a cold chocolate sauce; but the plumbing was perfect.  Archer would have liked to travel, to put off the housing question; but, though the Wellands approved of an extended European honeymoon (perhaps even a winter in Egypt), they were firm as to the need of a house for the returning couple.  The young man felt that his fate was sealed: