nvelope, and reentered Mr.
Letterblair's office.

"Here are the letters, sir. If you wish, I'll see Madame Olenska," he
said in a constrained voice.

"Thank you--thank you, Mr. Archer. Come and dine with me tonight if
you're free, and we'll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish
to call on our client tomorrow."

Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon. It was a
winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon
above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul's lungs with the
pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr.
Letterblair were closeted together after dinner. It was impossible to
decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska himself
rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes. A great wave of
compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood
before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs
from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.

He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland's request to be
spared whatever was "unpleasant" in her history, and winced at the
thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New
York air so pure. "Are we only Pharisees after all?" he wondered,
puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human
vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty.

For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had
always been. He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of
risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs.
Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming
air of adventure. But Mrs. Rushworth was "that kind of woman";
foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the
secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he
possessed. When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but
now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case. The affair, in short,
had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been
through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed
belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and
respected and those one enjoyed--and pitied. In this view they were
sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female
relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer's belief that when "such things
happened" i