learning. He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer on their side; and he recalled, with a start of comprehension, a remark of May’s during their drive home from Mrs. Manson Mingott’s on the day of the Archery Meeting: “Perhaps, after all, Ellen would be happier with her husband.”
Even in the tumult of new discoveries Archer remembered his indignant exclamation, and the fact that since then his wife had never named Madame Olenska to him. Her careless allusion had no doubt been the straw held up to see which way the wind blew; the result had been reported to the family, and thereafter Archer had been tacitly omitted from their counsels. He admired the tribal discipline which made May bow to this decision. She would not have done so, he knew, had her conscience protested; but she probably shared the family view that Madame Olenska would be better off as an unhappy wife than as a separated one, and that there was no use in discussing the case with Newland, who had an awkward way of suddenly not seeming to take the most fundamental things for granted.
Archer looked up and met his visitor’s anxious gaze. “Don’t you know, Monsieur—is it possible you don’t know—that the family begin to doubt if they have the right to advise the Countess to refuse her husband’s last proposals?”
“The proposals you brought?”
“The proposals I brought.”
It was on Archer’s lips to exclaim that whatever he knew or did not know was no concern of M. Rivière’s; but something in the humble and yet courageous tenacity of M. Rivière’s gaze made him reject this conclusion, and he met the young man’s question with another. “What is your object in speaking to me of this?”