It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?
“We might be much better off,” he said. “We might be altogether together—we might travel.”
Her face lit up. “That would be lovely,” she owned: she would love to travel. But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things so differently.
“As if the mere ‘differently’ didn’t account for it!” the wooer insisted.
“Newland! You’re so original!” she exulted.
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to the point of calling him original.
“Original!” he said. “We’re all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the same folded paper. We’re like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can’t you and I strike out for ourselves, May?”
He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.
“Mercy—shall we elope?” she laughed.
“If you would—”
“You DO love me, Newland! I’m so happy.”
“But then—why not be happier?”
“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
“Why not—why not—why not?”
She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew very well that they couldn’t, but it was troublesome to have to produce a reason. “I’m not clever enough to argue with you. But that kind of thing is rather—vulgar, isn’t it?” she suggested, relieved to have hit on a word that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.
“Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?” he asked, knowing her answer, but waiting for her response nevertheless. She had seemingly gotten the better of him with her claim of not being clever.
May drew near Newland and looked up and into his eyes. They were quite alone, tucked away under the Mall, ceiled with the lapis lazuli. “Kiss me, my darling man.”
Newland took her in his arms and kissed her tender lips. When he broke the kiss, she said softly, “I do so want to please you, Newland. I’m sure you can understand that. It’s not so long to wait.”
He shrugged, continuing to hold her near.
“You would have us live as man and wife now,” she said. “I certainly can appreciate that.”
“Can you?”
“It is always more difficult for the man.”
“Dearest May.”
She slowly lowered her hands from the small of his back to his firm seat. “I could please you, my love.”
“I wouldn’t want you to …”
She squeezed his buttocks with her delicate hands; his body stiffened.
“May?”
“I’m not so opposed to pleasuring you my love, especially since we are to wait longer than you would prefer to be man and wife. There are ways to please a man other than the conventional manner. A woman needn’t be so limited in her approach.”
“You would do …?”
One of her hands slid around to the front of his trousers and grasped his jewels. “I think I understand simple pleasures.”
He didn’t speak, and without argument let her massage him.
“I do so want to know you, Newland,” she said as she unfastened his trousers.
“May,” he said, his voice quaking. “We’re not alone.”
She gazed around them. “Oh, I think we are quite alone, Newland. If you do recall, the others who might be here have all gone to church.”
He relaxed after looking nervously around them. “Yes. Of course. ” He smiled at her devilishly.
She reached inside his trousers and touched his suddenly erect manhood. Her fingers were gentle and slid the length of his staff and back up again, stopping to circle the tip of his crown with a dainty finger. She gazed over her shoulder one more time, and then turned her attention back to her task. With her gentle fingertips, she clasped his staff and pulled it free from his undergarment. With it standing in the open air, she giggled, and began to play with his crown as though she had been given a precious new toy for the first time in her life.
“May,” he whispered. “Maybe you should not—”
“You don’t mind, terribly, do you, Newland? You won’t think I’m a …” She giggled again.
“No,” he said, as she stroked the length of his staff and then grasped his jewels. “I must say, I am quite enjoying your … ”
She brought her hand up to his crown again. “Then let me pleasure you more, my dear.”
“Yes,” he said, his tone hoarse with arousal.
She circled her soft fingertip around the edge of his crown, dipping underneath its umbrella. She slowly and quite deliberately took her time to know him completely.
“Come with me,” she said. Gripping his engorged staff, she led him to the bench just behind them. She seated herself, all the while giggling as though she had just discovered a secret, hidden treasure. She brought both of her hands to his rampant, throbbing cock, and began to stroke him with a more animated, passionate rhythm.
“Oh, Newland,” she said, as she worked harder to please him. “Do you like it?” She gazed up at him and looked into his face. “Do you, my love?”
Newland opened his eyes, looked down at her, and stared longingly into her eyes. “Yes, but … I, well, I … ”
She continued stroking him. “But? Just tell me my love.”
“I might find a greater pleasure if you, well, if you would … swirl your lovely tongue around my manhood.”
May looked down at his throbbing member in her hands. Newland could see that the thought of her placing a tongue on his manhood had never occurred to her. Yet, by her expression, he saw that the very idea, from the moment he uttered the words, suddenly appealed to her sensibilities. In fact, it struck her as fascinating, he realized. She looked at him as though his manhood was magical.
“Doing this for you makes me feel so tingly inside,” she said. “Tingly in my …” She giggled, and overcome, lowered her face and touched her tongue to the tip of his crown, tasting him. When she licked the opening, he moaned in pleasure. Overwhelmed herself, she sighed, and then began to swirl her tongue as though heaven had descended upon her.
He began to grind his hips more insistently toward her sensuous and loving touch. And May, impassioned by his desire, swirled her tongue more earnestly, taking in every elegant curve of his anatomy. The act warmed her body and moistened her female folds as if he were touching her himself.
She lifted her head and smiled at him. I never imagined for all the world that I could experience such delectable pleasure.” Then she resumed her licking and kissing of his member.
“May, I-I …” he said, uttering some incoherent sounds.
“Yes, my dear?”
“Take it inside, deeper.”
May took his staff deeper into her mouth, bringing him farther and farther into her throat.
“Draw it in and out, slowly at first,” he said.
When she reached the base of his staff, she began moving his member in and out of her succulent oral vessel. His body jerked and throbbed at first, and when she hastened the pace, he fell into beat with her controlling strokes. As she took him in and out, all the while bathing his staff with her tongue, circling his crown when she brought him to her lips, she seemed to revel in the sounds of his impassioned sighs and manly groans.
“Suckle me, dear May,” he said, groaning.
She was relentless, an
d continued, suckling him harder and harder, until he was under her complete control.
“Oh, May, I’m about to …”
She broke for a moment. “Yes, dear?”
“It would so please me if you swallowed when I release.”
She smiled at him devilishly, and then returned to pleasuring him.
She licked, and suckled, taking him deeper and deeper, until, finally, finally, when she took him deep into her throat, he released. And as she pulled forward, he spilled his seed onto her tongue. She slowly withdrew her mouth and swallowed. Then she lingered with her lips along the length of his staff and stopped at his crown. There, she delighted in circling the tip of his crown.
“My dear May,” he said, as he recovered himself.
And then, without preamble, she stood with the utmost grace and looked into Newland’s face. But all he could do was gaze at her awkwardly, as he covered himself. As if there had been no more than a breath of air inhaled and exchanged from her lungs, she returned her conversation to exactly where they had left off before she had satisfied him.
“You asked me a question before,” she said matter-of-factly. “You asked if I was so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?” She was evidently staggered by this notion. “Of course I should hate it—so would you,” she rejoined, a trifle irritably, but certainly only to make her point.
He stood silent, after dressing himself, and beating his stick nervously against his boot-top; he hummed to himself feeling perplexed, and feeling also that she had indeed found the right way of closing the discussion whether he appreciated it or not. He thought she might not say more, but then, she went on light-heartedly, and said: “Oh, did I tell you that I showed Ellen my ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever saw. There’s nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she said. I do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!”
The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat smoking sullenly in his study, Janey wandered in on him. He had failed to stop at his club on the way up from the office where he exercised the profession of the law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New Yorkers of his class. He was out of spirits and slightly out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.
“Sameness—sameness!” he muttered, the word running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only what they were likely to be talking about, but the part each one would take in the discussion. The Duke of course would be their principal theme; though the appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black cobs (for which Beaufort was generally thought responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone into. Such “women” (as they were called) were few in New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer, and the appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated society. Only the day before, her carriage had passed Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s, and the latter had instantly rung the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to drive her home. “What if it had happened to Mrs. van der Luyden?” people asked each other with a shudder. Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very hour, holding forth on the disintegration of society.
He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey entered, and then quickly bent over his book (Swinburne’s “Chastelard”—just out) as if he had not seen her. She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books, opened a volume of the “Contes Drolatiques,” made a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: “What learned things you read!”
“Well—?” he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like before him.
“Mother’s very angry.”
“Angry? With whom? About what?”
“Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here. She brought word that her brother would come in after dinner: she couldn’t say very much, because he forbade her to: he wishes to give all the details himself. He’s with cousin Louisa van der Luyden now.”
“For heaven’s sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. It would take an omniscient Deity to know what you’re talking about.”
“It’s not a time to be profane, Newland… . Mother feels badly enough about your not going to church … “
With a groan he plunged back into his book.
“NEWLAND! Do listen. Your friend Madame Olenska was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s party last night: she went there with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort.”
At the last clause of this announcement a senseless anger swelled the young man’s breast. To smother it he laughed. How dare she go off to a party after he had made such passionate love to her! “Well, what of it? I knew she meant to.”
Janey paled and her eyes began to project. “You knew she meant to—and you didn’t try to stop her? To warn her?”
“Stop her? Warn her?” He laughed again. “I’m not engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska!” The words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.
“You’re marrying into her family.”
“Oh, family—family!” he jeered.
“Newland—don’t you care about Family?”
“Not a brass farthing.”
“Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will think?”
“Not the half of one—if she thinks such old maid’s rubbish.”
“Mother is not an old maid,” said his virgin sister with pinched lips.
He felt like shouting back: “Yes, she is, and so are the van der Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality.” But he saw her long gentle face puckering into tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was inflicting.
“Hang Countess Olenska! Don’t be a goose, Janey—I’m not her keeper.”
“No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce your engagement sooner so that we might all back her up; and if it hadn’t been for that cousin Louisa would never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke.”
“Well—what harm was there in inviting her? She was the best-looking woman in the room; she made the dinner a little less funereal than the usual van der Luyden banquet.”
“You know cousin Henry asked her to please you: he persuaded cousin Louisa. And now they’re so upset that they’re going back to Skuytercliff tomorrow. I think, Newland, you’d better come down. You don’t seem to understand how mother feels.”
In the drawing-room Newland found his mother. She raised a troubled brow from her needlework to ask: “Has Janey told you?”
“Yes.” He tried to keep his tone as measured as her own. “But I can’t take it very seriously.”
“Not the fact of having offended cousin Louisa and cousin Henry?”
“The fact that they can be offended by such a trifle as Countess Olenska’s going to the house of a woman they consider common.”
“Consider—!”
“Well, who is; but who has good music, and amuses people on Sunday evenings, when the whole of New York is dying of inanition.”
“Good music? All I know is, there was a woman who got up on a table and sang the things they sing at the places you go to in Paris. There was smoking and champagne.”
“Well—that kind of thing happens in other places, and the world still goes on.”
“I don’t suppose, dear, you’re really defending the French Sunday?”
“I’ve heard you often enough, mother, grumble at the English Sunday when we’ve been in London.”
“New York is neither Paris nor London.”
“Oh, no, it’s not!” her son groaned.
“You mean, I suppose, that society here is not as brilliant? You’re right, I daresay; but we belong here, and people should respect our ways when they come among us. Ellen Olenska especially: she came back to get away from the kind of life people lead in brilliant societies.”
Newland made no answer, and a
fter a moment his mother ventured: “I was going to put on my bonnet and ask you to take me to see cousin Louisa for a moment before dinner.” He frowned, and she continued: “I thought you might explain to her what you’ve just said: that society abroad is different … that people are not as particular, and that Madame Olenska may not have realised how we feel about such things. It would be, you know, dear,” she added with an innocent adroitness, “in Madame Olenska’s interest if you did.”
“Dearest mother, I really don’t see how we’re concerned in the matter. The Duke took Madame Olenska to Mrs. Struthers’s—in fact he brought Mrs. Struthers to call on her. I was there when they came. If the van der Luydens want to quarrel with anybody, the real culprit is under their own roof.”
“Quarrel? Newland, did you ever know of cousin Henry’s quarrelling? Besides, the Duke’s his guest; and a stranger too. Strangers don’t discriminate: how should they? Countess Olenska is a New Yorker, and should have respected the feelings of New York.”
“Well, then, if they must have a victim, you have my leave to throw Madame Olenska to them,” cried her son, exasperated. “I don’t see myself—or you either—offering ourselves up to expiate her crimes.”
“Oh, of course you see only the Mingott side,” his mother answered, in the sensitive tone that was her nearest approach to anger.
The sad butler drew back the drawing-room portieres and announced: “Mr. Henry van der Luyden.”
Mrs. Archer dropped her needle and pushed her chair back with an agitated hand.
“Another lamp,” she cried to the retreating servant, while Janey bent over to straighten her mother’s cap.
Mr. van der Luyden’s figure loomed on the threshold, and Newland Archer went forward to greet his cousin.
“We were just talking about you, sir,” he said.
Mr. van der Luyden seemed overwhelmed by the announcement. He drew off his glove to shake hands with the ladies, and smoothed his tall hat shyly, while Janey pushed an armchair forward, and Archer continued: “And the Countess Olenska.”
Mrs. Archer paled.
“Ah—a charming woman. I have just been to see her,” said Mr. van der Luyden, complacency restored to his brow. He sank into the chair, laid his hat and gloves on the floor beside him in the old-fashioned way, and went on: “She has a real gift for arranging flowers. I had sent her a few carnations from Skuytercliff, and I was astonished. Instead of massing them in big bunches as our head-gardener does, she had scattered them about loosely, here and there … I can’t say how. The Duke had told me: he said: `Go and see how cleverly she’s arranged her drawing-room.’ And she has. I should really like to take Louisa to see her, if the neighbourhood were not so—unpleasant.”
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