No appeal could have found a more immediate response in Archer’s breast; but he wished that the necessity of their action had been represented by some ideal reason, and not simply by poor Ellen Olenska. The group about Miss Welland made way for him with significant smiles, and after taking his share of the felicitations he drew his betrothed into the middle of the ballroom floor and put his arm about her waist.
“Now we shan’t have to talk,” he said, smiling into her candid eyes, as they floated away on the soft waves of the Blue Danube.
She made no answer. Her lips trembled into a smile, but the eyes remained distant and serious, as if bent on some ineffable vision. “Dear,” Archer whispered, pressing her to him: it was borne in on him that the first hours of being engaged, even if spent in a ballroom, had in them something grave and sacramental. What a new life it was going to be, with this whiteness, radiance, goodness at one’s side!
The dance over, the two, as became an affianced couple, wandered into the conservatory; and sitting behind a tall screen of tree-ferns and camellias Newland pressed her gloved hand to his lips. His chest swelled with pride.
“You see I did as you asked me to,” she said.
“Yes: I couldn’t wait,” he answered smiling. After a moment he added: “Only I wish it hadn’t had to be at a ball.” But he could not be disappointed, for his fondest wish had been realized this evening, and he was now free to share with the world his love for his betrothed, May Welland.
“Yes, I know.” She met his glance comprehendingly. “But after all—even here we’re alone together, aren’t we?”
“Oh, dearest—always!” Archer cried. Her innocence dazzled him, kindling lustful urges within his loins, an insatiable desire to ravage her flesh. But he refrained and considered what she had said.
Evidently she was always going to understand; she was always going to say the right thing. The discovery made the cup of his bliss overflow, and he went on gaily: “The worst of it is that I want to kiss you and I can’t.” As he spoke he took a swift glance about the conservatory, assured himself of their momentary privacy, and catching her to him laid a fugitive pressure on her lips. To counteract the audacity of this proceeding he led her to a bamboo sofa in a less elaborate, but more secluded part of the conservatory, and sitting down beside her broke a lily-of-the-valley from her bouquet. He took the lily from the bouquet, brought it to his lips, and breathed in its subtle, but elegant fragrance. He considered the broken stem of the flower and how delicate the plant seemed. Beads of liquid seeped from it. He touched the wetness and then looked into his beloved’s eyes. Any restraint that he might have felt moments ago was lost. He was suddenly spurred on to taste what was his alone—May Welland. She sat silent, and the world lay like a sunlit valley at their feet. He could wait no longer.
He took her face in his hands and looked longingly into her eyes.
“We mustn’t,” she whispered nervously.
He kissed her gently and then sensuously licked her bottom lip. When she sighed, he pressed his mouth to hers and probed inside. Her body quivered, and he knew that she had not expected such boldness. And yet, she did not withdraw her affection, but reciprocated by beginning to swirl her velvety tongue with great enthusiasm.
Then he withdrew from the kiss. “Slowly,” he said, knowing this was her first time.
She acquiesced to his request, letting him guide her, show her the way of love, moaning as he slowly and gently built the rhythm.
His experienced hands fell naturally to her bosom, not out of habit, but out of desire to touch her as he kissed her. The moment his hands touched her breasts, she trembled and reflexively tried to pull back. “Oh, you shouldn’t,” she demurred. But, his touch was too powerful. She might have offered greater resistance, but from the moment his fingers brushed across her nipples, which were protruding hard and ripe against the fabric of her dress, he knew that he held her captive.
When he massaged the tips of her breasts with his thumbs, she sighed with such pleasure that he was driven to satisfy more of her needs. He squeezed the tips of her nipples, gently at first, but when she responded enthusiastically with a lustful moan, he increased the pressure. Her body moved insistently to his touch, and he knew that she wanted even more.
He slipped his hands inside her dress and grasped a bare breast in each. She did not hesitate, but moved to encourage him. He massaged the entirety of her breasts first and then moved his fingers to the hard tips of her nipples. He circled his thumbs around them and then clasped the tips between his fingers and squeezed, causing her to shudder and squeal with delight.
He broke from the kiss and slid his lips across her cheeks and down her neck, lingering at the hollow of her neck, all the while, tracing his fingers across her breasts. Then he moved his lips lower until he found her bosom. He ran his tongue across one of her nipples, exploring its curves. She moaned in pleasure, and did so again and when he moved his tongue to the other nipple. And after he had explored both nipples with his lips and tongue, he took her breast inside his mouth and began to suck, spinning his tongue.
She tasted sweet, like morning dew, and smelled of lilies. He thought of the flower with the broken stem and the moisture oozing from the breakage. How could something so pure ever be broken? His mind meandered to more lascivious thoughts. Never again would Newland Archer be able to look at May Welland and view her as anything other than the pure virgin whose stem he had broken.
He pulled his mouth forward to find the erect tip of her nipple. He swirled his tongue around it, feeling the firm, but soft texture of her flesh. Her pure complexion, complemented by the pale pink of her nipples, aroused his manly desires so much that if they were completely alone, he would have stripped the clothes from her body and ravished her at once. But their circumstances were tenuous, and if nothing more, he would taste the dew from her well. That she could not deny him, not now, not when she moved so desirously.
He lowered his hands, outlining her form as he fell lower to her waist, where he stopped and surrounded her body with his hands. Though he continued to kiss her breasts, nuzzling his face between them, rolling his tongue from one nipple to the next, he held her torso firmly so that she would know his strength. Then he moved his hands lower. When he could go no further, he slid from his seated position to the floor. He took the bottom edge of her dress in his hands and slowly lifted her skirts. He placed the fabric across her knees, looked up to meet her eyes, and eased her legs apart.
“Newland, don’t!” she whispered, feigning resistance. But though her words said no, her body yielded to his desires.
He brought a hand to one of her breasts, taking the tip between his fingers, and tenderly rolled the delicate flesh between his fingers. Her breath caught in her throat, and as before, her eyelids fluttered, and then she closed them tightly.
Newland knew that the opportunity had presented itself. He slipped her lace undergarment from her body and then encouraged her to lie back against the bench. He slipped the undergarment in his pocket and grasped her lower legs. He slid his hands along the smoothness of her skin, and then opened her legs so that he might revel in what his virgin bride-to-be offered him.
May brought her hands to her breasts and began massaging in a manner similar to the one her lover had shown her. She sighed as he slowly, but firmly, moved his hands up the length of her inner thighs, separating them. He dipped underneath her bottom, and then lifted her legs to place them over his shoulders. When she was positioned as he wanted her, he drew in a deep breath, inhaling all of her passionate perfume.
“Oh, my heavens, yes!” she said, her body quivering with desire.
“I will pleasure you, my love.”
Then he touched his tongue to her intimate flesh, rolling it from her moist well of passion to the upper reaches of her form where he found her pearl. He stopped to circle his tongue around her protruding gem, and she trembled with pleasure. And the more he pleasured her, the more she moaned, surrendering completely to his to
uch. He was so overcome with desire from tasting her fruit and inhaling her fragrance that, had they not been at a crowded ball, he would have lain upon her—the formalities of marriage be damned. However, he restrained himself with difficulty and continued to please his young bride-to-be until he brought her to the pinnacle of desire. Her hips moved to his every touch; she needed release. Swooping his tongue downward, he tasted her rich cream and then returned to her pearl, on which his tongue began to dance lightly, swirling round and round, stroking it more insistently until she reached the summit of her pleasure.
“Oh, my goodness, I have never … ” Her words were lost when he inhaled deeply. Her body quaked, and when she exhaled, she crested, her body giving way to lust.
Newland drew away from her body, certain that he had shown his fair love the pleasures a man might offer his bride. He was pleased with himself for taking what was his when he so chose.
Suddenly, Newland heard the sound of others approaching. Making haste, he quickly returned to May’s intimate flower to consume the fruit of her creamy release. Her entire body shuddered, as if she was experiencing a second climax. He ran his tongue along the length of her folds, and then covered her legs with her dress. Then he rose and seated himself upon the settee, making sure to position himself a foot apart from her.
When the couple who had ventured into the room passed by, May began conversing with Newland about a new topic as though their passionate love scene had never happened. It was not her nature to acknowledge what had occurred.
“Did you tell my cousin Ellen?” she asked presently, as if she spoke through a dream.
He roused himself, and remembered that he had not done so. Some invincible repugnance to speak of such things to the strange foreign woman had checked the words on his lips.
“No—I hadn’t the chance after all,” he said, fibbing hastily.
“Ah.” She looked disappointed, but gently resolved on gaining her point. “You must, then, for I didn’t either; and I shouldn’t like her to think—”
“Of course not. But aren’t you, after all, the person to do it?”
She pondered on this. “If I’d done it at the right time, yes: but now that there’s been a delay I think you must explain that I’d asked you to tell her at the Opera, before our speaking about it to everybody here. Otherwise she might think I had forgotten her. You see, she’s one of the family, and she’s been away so long that she’s rather—sensitive.”
Archer looked at her glowingly. “Dear and great angel! Of course I’ll tell her.” He glanced a trifle apprehensively toward the crowded ballroom. “But I haven’t seen her yet. Has she come?”
“No; at the last minute she decided not to.”
“At the last minute?” he echoed, betraying his surprise that she should ever have considered the alternative possible.
“Yes. She’s awfully fond of dancing,” the young girl answered simply. “But suddenly she made up her mind that her dress wasn’t smart enough for a ball, though we thought it so lovely; and so my aunt had to take her home.”
“Oh, well—” said Archer with happy indifference. Nothing about his betrothed pleased him more than her resolute determination to carry to its utmost limit that ritual of ignoring the “unpleasant” in which they had both been brought up.
“She knows as well as I do,” he reflected, “the real reason of her cousin’s staying away; but I shall never let her see by the least sign that I am conscious of there being a shadow of a shade on poor Ellen Olenska’s reputation.”
Chapter 4
In the course of the next day the first of the usual betrothal visits were exchanged. The New York ritual was precise and inflexible in such matters; and in conformity with it Newland Archer first went with his mother and sister to call on Mrs. Welland, after which he and Mrs. Welland and May drove out to old Mrs. Manson Mingott’s to receive that venerable ancestress’s blessing.
A visit to Mrs. Manson Mingott was always an amusing episode to the young man. The house in itself was already an historic document, though not, of course, as venerable as certain other old family houses in University Place and lower Fifth Avenue. Those were of the purest 1830, with a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets, rosewood consoles, round-arched fireplaces with black marble mantels, and immense glazed bookcases of mahogany; whereas old Mrs. Mingott, who had built her house later, had bodily cast out the massive furniture of her prime, and mingled with the Mingott heirlooms the frivolous upholstery of the Second Empire. It was her habit to sit in a window of her sitting-room on the ground floor, as if watching calmly for life and fashion to flow northward to her solitary doors. She seemed in no hurry to have them come, for her patience was equalled by her confidence. She was sure that presently the hoardings, the quarries, the one-story saloons, the wooden greenhouses in ragged gardens, and the rocks from which goats surveyed the scene, would vanish before the advance of residences as stately as her own—perhaps (for she was an impartial woman) even statelier; and that the cobblestones over which the old clattering omnibuses bumped would be replaced by smooth asphalt, such as people reported having seen in Paris. Meanwhile, as every one she cared to see came to HER (and she could fill her rooms as easily as the Beauforts, and without adding a single item to the menu of her suppers), she did not suffer from her geographic isolation.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.
The burden of Mrs. Manson Mingott’s flesh had long since made it impossible for her to go up and down stairs, and with characteristic independence she had made her reception rooms upstairs and established herself (in flagrant violation of all the New York proprieties) on the ground floor of her house; so that, as you sat in her sitting-room window with her, you caught (through a door that was always open, and a looped-back yellow damask portiere) the unexpected vista of a bedroom with a huge low bed upholstered like a sofa, and a toilet-table with frivolous lace flounces and a gilt-framed mirror.
Her visitors were startled and fascinated by the foreignness of this arrangement, which recalled scenes in French fiction, and architectural incentives to immorality such as the simple American had never dreamed of. That was how women with lovers lived in the wicked old societies, in apartments with all the rooms on one floor, and all the indecent propinquities that their novels described. It amused Newland Archer (who had secretly situated the love-scenes of “Monsieur de Camors” in Mrs. Mingott’s bedroom) to picture her blameless life led in the stage-setting of adultery; but he said to himself, with considerable admiration, that if a lover had been what she wanted, the intrepid woman would have had him too.
Newland allowed his imagination to roam through the pages of such an illicit novel. And whom should he find, but the ancestress herself in her boudoir.
“Send in the footman,” old Mrs. Mingott said in a loud voice.
The butler appeared from behind the yellow damask portiere and bowed. “Madame?”
“I told you to send in the footman,” she said. “Are you becoming deaf, my good man?”
“No, ma’am. I mean, yes, ma’am. I mean … I shall call in the footman.”
“And tell him to leave his trousers at the door. I won’t have him undressing before me.”
“Ve
ry well, Madame.”
“And he need not dally, for I have needs.”
Some moments later, the footman, a man half the age of the ancestress, slunk around the heavy fabric of the curtain door and presented himself to her. His long mousey-colored hair, which he tied behind his head, fell like the scraggly strands of a horse’s tail. His face was structurally long, with a bony appearance that rendered a blank, but obedient, expression. As instructed, he had removed his trousers and left them at the door. However, he had not entirely undressed. He kept on a bright red jacket with a stiff white-collared shirt underneath it, with shirttails covering his loins. And then there were his boots. As a rule, he was to leave them on to cover anything unsightly.
Footie, the pet name Mrs. Mingott had given him long ago, was familiar with the duties his mistress required of him. He was not only to attend to the horses and carriages, but he was also to service her every passionate, lustful whim. How he came to be the Chosen One was no mystery. He was the only servant thin enough to squeeze between her expanse of firm pink and white flesh. But that was not all—it also pleased her to no end that he was greatly endowed; or as more simply said by the other servants, he was hung. The ancestress had long been partial to long, thin members. Rumors had it that her late husband had been puny.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” she said. “I have needs good fellow.”
The quavering footman took gangly, reluctant, strides toward his mistress and stopped once he stood before her massive person. “What is your pleasure today?” he asked.
“Show me your cock.”
“As you wish, Madame.” The footman lifted his shirttails to reveal his shaft and a magnificent pair of baubles. Both member and jewels were of a prodigious size and proportion, especially compared to that of his bony legs and knocked knees. And remarkably, Footie’s member was of great length even soft.
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