All Chapters of The Age of Innocence: Chapter 31 - Chapter 35

Archer had been stunned by old Catherine's news. It was only natural that Madame Olenska should have hastened from Washington in response to her grandmother's summons; but that she should have decided to remain under her roof—especially now that Mrs. Mingott had almost regained her health—was less easy to explain.Archer was sure that Madame Olenska's decision had not been influenced by the change in her financial situation. He knew the exact figure of the small income which her husband had allowed her at their separation. Without the addition of her grandmother's allowance it was hardly enough to live on, in any sense known to the Mingott vocabulary; and now that Medora Manson, who shared her life, had been ruined, such a pittance would barely keep the two women clothed and fed. Yet Archer was convinced that Madame Olenska had not accepted her grandmother's offer from interested motives.She had the heedless generosity and the spasmodic extravagance of persons used to large fortunes

It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young couple to give their first big dinner.The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good deal of company in an informal way. Archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal affairs. Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked any one to the house; but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the shape into which tradition and training had moulded her. It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of informal entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to the tradition.But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to be lightly undertake

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.