THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
blood rushing to his temples as if he had been caught by a bent-back branch in a thicket.
"And on whose behalf," he said, "do you wish to do this?"
M. Rivière met the question sturdily. "Well—I might say hers, if it did not sound like a liberty. Shall I say instead: on behalf of abstract justice?"
Archer considered him ironically. "In other words: you are Count Olenski's messenger?"
He saw his blush more darkly reflected in M. Rivière's sallow countenance. "Not to you, Monsieur. If I come to you, it is on quite other grounds."
"What right have you, in the circumstances, to be on any other ground?" Archer retorted. "If you're an emissary you're an emissary."
The young man considered. "My mission is over: as far as the Countess Olenska goes, it has failed."
"I can't help that," Archer rejoined on the same note of irony.
"No: but you can help—" M. Rivière paused, turned his hat about in his still carefully gloved hands, looked into its lining and then back at Archer's face. "You can help, Monsieur, I am convinced, to make it equally a failure with her family."
Archer pushed back his chair and stood up. "Well—and by God I will!" he exclaimed. He stood with his hands in his pockets, staring down wrathfully at the little Frenchman, whose face, though he too had risen, was still an inch or two below the line of Archer's eyes.
M. Rivière paled to his normal hue: paler than that his complexion could hardly turn.
"Why the devil," Archer explosively continued, "should you have thought—since I suppose you're appealing to me on the ground of my relationship to Madame Olenska—
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