“May is a darling; I’ve seen no young girl in New York so handsome and so intelligent. Are you very much in love with her?”
Newland Archer reddened and laughed. “As much as a man can be.”
She continued to consider him thoughtfully, as if not to miss any shade of meaning in what he said, “Do you think, then, there is a limit?”
“To being in love? If there is, I haven’t found it!”
She glowed with sympathy. “Ah—it’s really and truly a romance?”
“The most romantic of romances!”
“How delightful! And you found it all out for yourselves—it was not in the least arranged for you?”
Archer looked at her incredulously. “Have you forgotten,” he asked with a smile, “that in our country we don’t allow our marriages to be arranged for us?”
A dusky blush rose to her cheek, and he instantly