They had crossed the Place des Invalides,and were walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the building.It was a quiet quarter, after all,in spite of its splendour and its history;and the fact gave one an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on,since such scenes as this were left to the few and the indifferent.
The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze,pricked here and there by a yellow electric light,and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned.Dallas stopped again, and looked up.
"It must be here," he said,slipping his arm through his father's with a movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood together looking up at the house.
It was a modern building, without distinctive character,but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured 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.