Introduction

Newland archer's marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas. The young girl who knew nothing and expected everything looked back at him like a stranger through may wellan's familiar features. And with a shiver of foreboding, he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on one side and hypocrisy on the other. He tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as larry leffrets nor a simpleton as poor gertrude. In reality, after all, they all lived