Ah, finished reading "the age of innocence" now...

god, i love this novel!

no, Archer was not unhappy or miserable at the end. The ending was amazingly graceful... He was faithful to May, even after she died. He chose not to go upstairs with his son to dine with Countess Olenska. I wonder why he didn't go up to see her after almost 30 years... Perhaps he decided that he wanted live in the memory of her images when she was still in the States almost 30 years ago. Besides, they had their own lives after Ellen Olenka left for Europe. It was a nice ending... So perhaps, Ellen would also appreciate his decision of not going up to see her. I think she would. Mom thinks that Archer didn't see her because he didn't want to destroy the feeling he had for her... I wish I know the reasons behind his decision... (literature ambiguity really drives me nuts sometimes)

I really wonder... I wish I can enter into someone's mindstream and see how he/she thinks about things and how he/she makes decisions based on his/her thoughts...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"It was the old New York way of taking life 'without effusion of blood': the way of people who dresaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than ;scenes,' except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances hand been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed"
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"'My Fanny--?'

'Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't.' continued his surprising son.

'I didn't,' echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

'No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--'

'Your mother?'

'Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone-- you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted.'

Archer received this strange communication in silence........At length he said in a low voice: 'She never asked me.'

'No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessedat what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dum asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.-- I say, Dad,' Dallas broke off,'you're not angry with me? If you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got to rush out to Versailles afterward.'

.......It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably...."