e amalgamated with the social structure. In
spite of odd ways they were said to be, for the most part, quite
respectable; but they preferred to keep to themselves. Medora Manson,
in her prosperous days, had inaugurated a "literary salon"; but it had
soon died out owing to the reluctance of the literary to frequent it.

Others had made the same attempt, and there was a household of
Blenkers--an intense and voluble mother, and three blowsy daughters who
imitated her--where one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,
and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and some of the
magazine editors and musical and literary critics.

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity concerning these
persons. They were odd, they were uncertain, they had things one
didn't know about in the background of their lives and minds.
Literature and art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs.
Archer was always at pains to tell her children how much more agreeable
and cultivated society had been when it included such figures as
Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of "The Culprit
Fay." The most celebrated authors of that generation had been
"gentlemen"; perhaps the unknown persons who succeeded them had
gentlemanly sentiments, but their origin, their appearance, their hair,
their intimacy with the stage and the Opera, made any old New York
criterion inapplicable to them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody
between the Battery and Canal Street; and only the people one knew had
carriages. It was perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can't
tell, and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of moral prejudices and
almost parvenu indifference to the subtler distinctions, might have
bridged the abyss; but she had never opened a book or looked at a
picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her of gala
nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph at the Tuileries.
Possibly Beaufort, who was her match in daring, would have succeeded in
bringing about a fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged
footmen were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover, he was as
illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and considered "fellows who wrote" as
the mere paid purveyors of rich men's pleasures; and no one rich enough
to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever since he could
re