nto the searching
illumination of Fifth Avenue.

"Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your
mistress--since I can't be your wife?" she asked.

The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women
of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about
the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a
recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used
familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her
question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.

"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words
like that--categories like that--won't exist. Where we shall be simply
two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each
other; and nothing else on earth will matter."

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear--where
is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he
remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to
find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside
stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it
wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather
smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."

He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the
phrase she had used a little while before.

"Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears," he said.

"Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds
people. What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids
open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. Isn't there
a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it's
a miserable little country!"

The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May's sturdy
brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky
trotter. Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.

"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.

"For US? But there's no US in that sense! We're near each other only
if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise
we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and
Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy
behind the backs of the people who trust them."

"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.

"No, you're not! You've never been beyond. And I have,"