Chapter 9: IX

IX The Countess Olenska had said “after five”; and at half after the hour Newland Archer rang the bell of the peeling stucco house with a giant wisteria throttling its feeble cast-iron balcony, which she had hired, far down West Twenty-third Street, from the vagabond Medora. It was certainly a strange quarter to have settled in. Small dressmakers, bird-stuffers and “people who wrote” were her nearest neighbours; and further down the dishevelled street Archer recognised a dilapidated wooden…