thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal
rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There
was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done
to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now
that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his
table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her
popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her
past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval.
Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her
nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat
at May's right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify
all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd
imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and
ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the
proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to
another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's
canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale
woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came
over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of
them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense
peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been,
for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and
patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet unknown
to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had
been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife
on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined
anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May
Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and
cousin.

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood":
the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed
decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to
them.

As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a
prisoner in the centre of an armed camp. He looked about the table,
and guessed at the inexorable