d on a
large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in
the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the
other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at the
frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young
creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying product
of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who
knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a
stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was
borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been
taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions
and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His own
exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to the
root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as
non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim the
kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were
therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready to
concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a
humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things
together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was
pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that,
on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her all
the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purely
hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was
absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE. But
Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and
May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,
as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a
marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one
of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should
tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed
his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that
answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which
he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived
that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the
ve