The Age of Innocence
front. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded
tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still
lowered, as though the sun had just left it.
"I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
_porte-cochère_ he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to
say: "The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings."
Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end
of their pilgrimage had been attained.
"I say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.
The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.
"I believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.
"Why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed.
"Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me."
Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. "But, I say, Dad: do you
mean you won't come up at all?"
"I don't know," said Archer slowly.
"If you don't she won't understand."
"Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."
Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.
"But what on earth shall I say?"
"My dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father
rejoined with a smile.
"Very well. I shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the
five flights because you don't like lifts."
His father smiled again. "Say I'm old-fashioned: that's enough."
Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture,
passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.
Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged
balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up
in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to
the hall, and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured Dallas
entering that room with his quick assured step and his delightful
smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy
"took after him."
Then he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at
that sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark
lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out
a long thin hand with three rings on it.... He thought she would be
sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her
on a table.
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard
himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose
its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each
other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes
never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the
windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew
up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got
up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
A Note on the Text
The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large installments in The
Pictorial Review, from July to October 1920. It was published that same
year in book form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and in London.
Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation, and spelling changes and
revisions between the serial and book publication, and more than thirty
subsequent changes were made after the second impression of the book
edition had been run off. This authoritative text is reprinted from the
Library of America edition of Novels by Edith Wharton, and is based on
the sixth impression of the first edition, which incorporates the last
set of extensive revisions that are obviously authorial.