Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Aires, where he represented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in charge of May Archer’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland, whose husband had been appointed the girl’s guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer’s children, and nobody was surprised when Dallas’s engagement was announced.
Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy—busy with reforms and “movements,” with fads and fetishes and frivolities—to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.
It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening