exible in such
matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his
mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs.
Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott's to receive that
venerable ancestress's blessing.

A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the
young man. The house in itself was already an historic document,
though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses
in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest
1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood
consoles, round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels, and
immense glazed book-cases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who
had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of
her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous
upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window
of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life
and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed in no
hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her
confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries,
the one-story saloons, the wooden green-houses in ragged gardens, and
the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the
advance of residences as stately as her own--perhaps (for she was an
impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobble-stones over which
the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth
asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as
every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her rooms as
easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu
of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle
life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump
active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something
as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this
submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in
extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost
unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which
the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A
flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a
st