ts's, uttered years ago in that very room: "If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort's
bastards."

It was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing;
and nobody wondered or reproved. Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who still
looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her
mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and
carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and
Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a
"set" from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned
beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an
Isabey miniature.

Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the
death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won
it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid
of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty, amusing
and accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-minded
enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's
past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered so obscure
an incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or
the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to the
notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife, and a
little girl who inherited her beauty. He was subsequently heard of in
Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American
travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he
represented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there in
the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had
appeared in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack
Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian. The
fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's
children, and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was
announced.

Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the
world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms
and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much
about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in the
huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same
plane?

Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately