 1 Major Amberson had made a fortune in 1873 when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916, and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darkened into a city, but reached its topmost during the period when every prosperous family with children kept a Newfoundland dog. In that town in those days all the women wore silk or velvet, and they knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet, and when there was a new purchase of seal-skin sick people were got to windows to see it go by. Trotters were out in the winter afternoons racing light sleighs on National Avenue and Tennessee Street. Everybody recognized both the trotters and the drivers, and again knew them as well on summer evenings when slim buggies whizzed by in renewals of the snow-time rivalry. For that matter everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage, could identify such a silhouette half a mile down the street, and thereby was sure who was going to market, or to a reception, or coming home from the office or store to noon dinner or evening supper. During the earlier years of this period elegance of personal appearance was believed to rest more upon the texture of garments than upon their shaping. A silk dress needed no remodeling when it was a year or so old. It remained distinguished by merely remaining silk. Old men and governors wore broadcloth. Full dress was broadcloth with doe-skin trousers, and there were seen men of all ages to whom a hat meant only that rigid tall silk thing known to impudence as a stovepipe. In town and country these men would wear no other hat, and without self-consciousness they went rowing in such hats. Shifting fashions of shape replaced aristocracy of texture. Dressmakers, shoemakers, hat-makers and tailors, increasing in cunning and in power, found means to make new clothes old. The long contagion of the Darby hat arrived. One season the crown of this hat would be a bucket, the next it would be a spoon. Every house still kept its boot-jack, but high-topped boots gave way to shoes and congress-gators, and these were played through fashions that shaped them now with toes like box-ends, and now with toes like the prowse of racing-shells. Trousers with a crease were considered plebeian. The crease proved that the garment had lain upon a shelf and hence was ready-made. These betraying trousers were called hand-me-downs in allusion to the shelf. In the early eighties while bangs and bustles were having their way with women, that variation of dandy known as the dude was invented. He wore trousers as tight as stockings, dagger-pointed shoes, a spoon Darby, a single-breasted coat called a Chesterfield with short flaring skirts, a torturing syndylical collar, laundered to a polish and three inches high, while his other neck-gear might be a heavy puffed cravat or a tiny bow fit for a doll's braids. With evening dress he wore a tan overcoat so short that his black coat-tails hung visible five inches below the overcoat. But after a season or two he lengthened his overcoat till it touched his heels, and he passed out of his tight trousers into trousers like great bags. Then presently he was seen no more, though the word that had been coined for him remained in the vocabularies of the impertinent. It was a hairier day than this. Beards were to the wearer's fancy, and things as strange as the Kaiser-Liech-Board tusk moustache were common place. Sideburns found nourishment upon childlike profiles. Great dundreary whiskers blew like tippets over young shoulders. Moustaches were trained as lambrequins over forgotten mouths, and it was possible for a senator of the United States to wear a mist of white whisker upon his throat only, not a newspaper in the land finding the ornament distinguished enough to warrant a lampoon. Surely no more is needed to prove that so short a time ago we were living in another age. At the beginning of the Ambersons great period most of the houses of the Midland town were of a pleasant architecture. They lacked style but also lacked pretentiousness, and whatever does not pretend at all has style enough. They stood in commodious yards well shaded by leftover forest-trees, elm and walnut and beech, with here and there a line of tall sycamores where the land had been made by filling bayous from the creek. The house of a prominent resident facing military square or National Avenue or Tennessee Street was built of brick upon a stone foundation, or of wood upon a brick foundation. Usually it had a front porch and a back porch, often a side porch too. There was a front hall, there was a side hall, and sometimes a back hall. From the front hall opened three rooms, the parlor, the sitting room, and the library, and the library could show warrant to its title, for some reason these people bought books. Commonly the family sat more in the library than in the sitting room, while callers, when they came formally, were kept to the parlor, a place of formidable polish and discomfort. The upholstery of the library furniture was a little shabby, but the hostile chairs and sofa of the parlor always looked new. For all the wear and tear they got they should have lasted a thousand years. Upstairs were the bedrooms, mother and father's room, the largest, a smaller room for one or two sons, another for one or two daughters. Each of these rooms containing a double bed, a wash stand, a bureau, a wardrobe, a little table, a rocking chair, and often a chair or two that had been slightly damaged downstairs, but not enough to justify either the expensive repair or decisive abandonment in the attic. And there was always a spare room for visitors, where the sewing machine usually was kept. And during the seventies there developed an appreciation of the necessity for a bathroom. Therefore the architects placed bathrooms in the new houses, and the older houses tore out a cupboard or two, set up a boiler beside the kitchen stove and sought a new godliness, each with its own bathroom. The great American plumber joke that many branched evergreen was planted at this time. At the rear of the house, upstairs, was a bleak little chamber called the girl's room. And in the stable there was another bedroom adjoining the hayloft and called the hired man's room. House and stable cost seven or eight thousand dollars to build, and people with that much money to invest in such comforts were classified as the rich. They paid the inhabitant of the girl's room two dollars a week, and in the latter part of this period two dollars and a half, and finally three dollars a week. She was Irish ordinarily or German, or it might be Scandinavian, but never native to the land, unless she happened to be a person of color. The man or youth who lived in the stable had like wages, and sometimes he too was lately a steerage voyager, but more oftener he was colored. After sunrise on pleasant mornings the alleys behind the stables were gay. Laughter and shouting went up and down their dusty lengths, with a lively accompaniment of curry-combs knocking against back fences and stable walls, for the darkies loved to curry their horses in the alley. Darkies always prefer to gossip and shouts instead of whispers, and they feel that profanity, unless it be vociferous, is almost worthless. Horrible phrases were caught by early rising children and carried to older people for definition, sometimes at inopportune moments, while less investigative children would often merely repeat the phrases in some subsequent flurry of agitation, and yet bring about consequences so emphatic as to be recalled with ease in middle life. They have passed those darky hired men of the Midland town, and the introspective horses they curried and brushed and whacked and amiably cursed. Those good old horses switch their tails at flies no more. For all their seeming permanence they might as well have been buffaloes, or the buffalo lap robes that grew bald in patches and used to slide from the careless driver's knees and hang unconcerned halfway to the ground. The stables have been transformed into other likenesses, or swept away, like the woodsheds, where were kept the stove-wood and the kindling that the girl and the hired man always quarreled over, who should fetch it. Horse and stable and woodshed, and the whole tribe of the hired man, all are gone. They went quickly, yet so silently, that we whom they served have not yet really noticed that they are vanished. So with other vanishings, there were the little bunty street cars on the long, single track that went its troubled way among the cobblestones. At the rear door of the car there was no platform, but a step where passengers clung in wet clumps when the weather was bad and the car crowded. The patrons, if not too absent-minded, put their fares into a slot, and no conductor paced the heaving floor, but the driver would wrap remindingly with his elbow upon the glass of the door to his little open platform if the nickels and the passengers did not appear to coincide in number. A lone mule drew the car and sometimes drew it off the track when the passengers would get out and push it on again. They really owed it courtesies like this, for the car was genially accommodating. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once and wait for her while she shut the window, put on her hat and cloak, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the girl what to have for dinner, and came forth from the house. The previous passengers made little objection to such gallantry on the part of the car. They were wont to expect as much for themselves on like occasions. In good weather the mule pulled the car a mile and a little less than twenty minutes, unless the stops were too long. But when the trolley car came, doing its mile and five minutes and better it would wait for nobody. Nor could its passengers have endured such a thing, because the faster they were carried the less time they had to spare. In the days before deathly contrivances hustled them through their lives, and when they had no telephones, another ancient vacancy profoundly responsible for leisure, they had time for everything. Time to think, to talk, time to read, time to wait for a lady. They even had time to dance square dances, quadrilles, and lancers. They also danced the racquette, and scotishes, and pokas, and such whims as the Portland Fancy. They pushed back the sliding doors between the parlor and the sitting-room, tacked down crash over the carpets, hired a few palms and green tubs, stationed three or four Italian musicians under the stairway in the front hall, and had great nights. But these people were gayist on New Year's Day. They made it a true festival, something no longer known. The women gathered to assist the hostess who kept open house, and the carefree men, dandified and perfumed, went about in sleighs or in carriages, and ponderous hacks going from open house to open house, leaving fantastic cards and fancy baskets as they entered each doorway, and emerging a little later more carefree than ever if the punch had been to their liking. It always was, and as the afternoon wore on, pedestrian saw great gesturing and waving of skin-tight lemon-gloves, while ruinous fragments of song were dropped behind as the carriages rolled up and down the streets. Keeping open house was a merry custom. It is gone, like the all-day picnic in the woods, and like that prettiest of all vanished customs, the serenade. When a lively girl visited the town, she did not long go uncerenated, though a visitor was not indeed needed to excuse a serenade. Of a summer night, young men would bring an orchestra under a pretty girl's window, or it might be her father's, or that of an ailing maiden aunt. And flute, harp, fiddle, cello, coronet, and bass file would presently release to the dulcet stars such melodies as sing-through, you'll remember me. I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls, silver threads among the gold, Kathleen Mavernine, or the soldiers farewell. They had other music to offer, too, for these were the happy days of Olivette and the mascot, and the chimes of Normandy, and Gérifle, Gérifla, and Fraud di Avila. Better than that, these were the days of Pinafore and the pirates of Penzance and of Patience. This last was needed in the Midland town, as elsewhere, for the aesthetic movement had reached thus far from London, and terrible things were being done to honest old furniture. Maiden sawed what-nots in two and gilded the remains. They took the rockers from rocking-chairs and gilded the inadequate legs. They gilded the easels that supported the crayon portraits of their deceased uncles. In the new spirit of art they sold old clocks for new, and threw wax flowers and wax fruit and the protecting glass domes out upon the trash heap. They filled vases with peacock feathers, or cattails, or sumac, or sunflowers, and set the vases upon mantelpieces and marble-topped tables. They embroidered daisies, which they called margarites, and sunflowers, and sumac, and cattails, and owls, and peacock feathers upon plush screens, and upon heavy cushions. Then strewed these cushions upon floors where fathers fell over them in the dark. In the teeth of sinful oratory the daughters went on embroidering. They embroidered daisies, and sunflowers, and sumac, and cattails, and owls, and peacock feathers upon throes, which they had the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas. They painted owls, and daisies, and sunflowers, and sumac, and cattails, and peacock feathers upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the chandeliers. They nailed paper fans to the walls. They studied painting on China. These girls sang toasty's new songs. They sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady painting, and were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a basket faten, on a spring morning. Croquet, and the mildest archery ever known, were the sports of people still young and active enough for so much exertion. Middle-age played Euchar. There was a theatre next door to the Amberson Hotel, and when Edwin Booth came for a night, everybody who could afford to buy a ticket was there, and all the hacks in town were hired. The black crook also filled the theatre, but the audience then was almost entirely of men who looked uneasy as they left for home when the final curtain fell upon the shocking girls dressed as fairies. But the theatre did not often do so well. The people of the town were still too thrifty. They were thrifty because they were the sons or grandsons of the early settlers who had opened the wilderness, and had reached it from the east and the south, with wagons and axes and guns, but with no money at all. The pioneers were thrifty, or they would have perished. They had to store away food for the winter or goods to trade for food, and they often feared they had not stored enough. They left traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion. To save, even for the sake of saving, was the earliest lesson and discipline. No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either upon art or upon mere luxury and entertainment without a sense of sin. Against so homespun of background the magnificence of the Ambersons was as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. Major Amberson bought two hundred acres of land at the end of National Avenue, and through this tract he built broad streets and cross streets, paved them with cedar block, and curbed them with stone. He set up fountains here and there where the streets intersected, and at symmetrical intervals placed cast-iron statues painted white, with their titles clear upon the pedestals. Minerva, Mercury, Hercules, Venus, Gladiator, Emperor Augustus, Fisher Boy, Staghound, Mastiff, Greyhound, Fawn, Antelope, Wounded Doe, and Wounded Lion. Most of the forest trees had been left to flourish still, and at some distance, or by moonlight, the place was in truth beautiful. But the ardent citizen loving to see his city grow wanted neither distance nor moonlight. He had not seen Versailles, but standing before the fountain of Neptune and Amberson Edition at bright noon, and quoting the favourite comparison of the local newspapers, he declared Versailles outdone. All this art showed a profit from the start, for the lots sold well, and there was something like a rush to build in the new edition. Its main thoroughfare and a bleak continuation of National Avenue was called Amberson Boulevard, and here, at the juncture of the new Boulevard and the Avenue, Major Amberson reserved four acres for himself, and built his new house—the Amberson Mansion, of course. This house was the pride of the town. Faced with stone as far back as the dining-room windows, it was a house of arches and turrets and girdling stone porches. It had the first porte-cauchère seen in that town. There was a central front hall with a great black walnut stairway, and opened to a green glass skylight called The Dome, three stories above the ground floor. A ballroom occupied most of the third story, and at one end of it was a carved walnut gallery for the musicians. Citizens told strangers that the cost of all this black walnut and wood carving was sixty thousand dollars. Sixty thousand dollars for the woodwork alone, yes, sir, and hardwood floors all over the house. Turkish rugs and no carpets at all except a Brussels carpet in the front parlor. I hear they call it the reception room. Hot and cold water upstairs and down, and stationary wash stands in every last bedroom in the place. They're sideboards built right into the house and goes all the way across one end of the dining-room. It isn't walnut. It's solid mahogany. Not veneering. Solid mahogany. Well, sir, I presume the President of the United States would be tickled to swap the White House for the new Amberson Mansion if the Major had given them the chance. But by the almighty dollar you bet your sweet life the Major wouldn't. The visitor to the town was certain to receive further enlightenment, for there was one form of entertainment never omitted. He was always patriotically taken for a little drive around our city, even if his host had to hire a hack. And the climax of the display was the Amberson Mansion. Look at that greenhouse they put up there in the side yard. The escort would continue. And look at that brick stable. Most folks would think the stable plenty big enough and good enough to live in. It's got running water and four rooms upstairs for two hired men and one of them's family to live in. They keep one hired man loafing in the house, and they got a married hired man out in the stable, and his wife does the washing. They got four box stalls for four horses, and they keep a coupé, and some new kinds of fancy rigs you never saw the beat of. Carts, they call two of them. Way up in the air they are. Too high for me. I guess they got every new kind of fancy rig in there that's been invented. And harness, while everybody in town can tell when Ambersons are out driving after dark by the jingle. This town never did see so much style as Ambersons are putting on these days, and I guess it's going to be expensive because a lot of other folks will try to keep up with them. The major's wife and the daughters been to Europe, and my wife tells me since they got back they make tea there every afternoon around five o'clock and drink it. Seems to me it would go against a person's stomach just before supper like that, and anyway tea isn't fit for much, not unless you're sick or something. My wife says Ambersons don't make lettuce salad the way other people do. They don't chop it up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their vinegar, and they have it separate, not along with the rest of the meal. And they eat these olives, too. Green things they are, something like a hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they taste a good deal like a bad hickory nut. My wife says she's going to buy some. You've got to eat nine, and then you get to like them, she says. Well, I wouldn't eat nine bad hickory nuts to get to like them, and I'm going to leave these olives alone. Kind of a woman's dish anyway, I suspect, but most everybody will be making a stagger to worm through nine of them now that the Ambersons have brought them to town. Yes, sir, the rest will eat them, whether they get sick or not. Looks to me like some people in this city would be willing to go crazy if they thought that would help them to be as high toned as the Ambersons. Old Alec Minifer, he's about the closest old caudra we got. He came into my office the other day, and he pretty near had a stroke telling me about his daughter Fanny. Seems Miss Isabelle Ambersons got some kind of a dog, they call it a St. Bernard, and Fanny was bound to have one, too. Well, Old Alec told her he didn't like dogs except rat terriers because a rat terrier cleans up the mice, but she kept on at him, and finally he said all right she could have one. Then, by George, she says Ambersons bought their dog, and you can't get one without paying for it. They cost from fifty to a hundred dollars up. Old Alec wanted to know if I ever heard of anybody buying a dog before, because of course even a Newfoundlander or a setter you can usually get somebody to give you one. He says he saw some sense in paying a nigger a dime or even a quarter to drown a dog for you, but to pay out fifty dollars and maybe more? Well, sir, he liked to choke himself to death right there in my office. Of course everybody realizes that Major Ambersons is a fine businessman, but what with throwing money around for dogs and every witch and what? Something all this style is bound to break him up if his family don't quit. One citizen, having thus discourse to a visitor, came to a thoughtful pause and then added, does seem pretty much like squandering yet, when you see that dog out walking with this Miss Isabelle, he seems worth the money. What does she look like? Well, sir, said the citizen, she's not more than just about eighteen or maybe nineteen years old, and I don't know as I know just how to put it, but she's kind of a delightful-looking young lady. End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 of The Magnificent Ambersons This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth-Tarkington Chapter 2 Another citizen said an eloquent thing about Miss Isabelle Ambersons' looks. This was Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster, the foremost literary authority and intellectual leader of the community, for both the daily newspapers thus described Mrs. Foster when she founded the Women's Tennyson Club, and her word upon art, letters, and the drama was accepted more as law than as opinion. Naturally when Hazel Kirk finally reached the town after its long triumph in larger places, many people waited to hear what Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster thought of it before they felt warranted in expressing any estimate of the play. In fact some of them waited in the lobby of the theatre as they came out and formed an inquiring group around her. I didn't see the play, she informed them. What? Why, we saw you right in the middle of the fourth row. Yes, she said smiling, but I was sitting just behind Isabelle Amberson. I couldn't look at anything except her wavy brown hair and the wonderful back of her neck. The ineligible young men of the town, they were all ineligible, were unable to content themselves with the view that had so charmed Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. They spent their time struggling to keep Miss Amberson's face turned toward them. She turned it most often, observers said, toward two—one excelling in the general struggle by his sparkle, and the other by that winning if not winsome old trait, persistence. The sparkling gentleman led Germans with her and sent sonnets to her with his bouquets, sonnets lacking neither music nor wit. He was generous, poor, well-dressed, and his amazing persuasiveness was one reason why he was always in debt. No one doubted that he would be able to persuade Isabelle, but he unfortunately joined to marry a party one night, and during a moonlight serenade upon the lawn before the Amberson mansion was easily identified from the windows as the person who stepped through the base file and had to be assisted to awaiting carriage. One of Miss Amberson's brothers was among the serenaders, and when the party had dispersed, remained propped against the front door in a state of helpless liveliness, the major going down in a dressing gown and slippers to bring him in and scolding mildly while imperfectly concealing strong impulses to laughter. Miss Amberson also laughed at this brother the next day, but for the suitor it was a different matter. She refused to see him when he called to apologize. You seem to care a great deal about base files, he wrote her. I promise never to break another. She made no response to the note unless it was an answer two weeks later when her engagement was announced. She took the persistent one, Wilbur Minifer, no breaker of base files or of hearts, no serenader at all. A few people, who always foresaw everything, claimed that they were not surprised, because the Wilbur Minifer might not be an Apollo, as it were. He was a steady young businessman and a good churchgoer, and Isabel Amberson was pretty sensible for such a showy girl. But the engagement astounded the young people and most of their fathers and mothers too, and as a topic it supplanted literature at the next meeting of the Women's Tennyson Club. Wilbur Minifer, a member cried, her inflection seeming to imply that Wilbur's crime was explained by his surname. Wilbur Minifer is the queerest thing I ever heard, to think of her taking Wilbur Minifer, just because a man any woman would like a thousand times better was a little wild one night at a serenade. No, said Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. It isn't that. It isn't even because she's afraid he'd be a dissipated husband and she wants to be safe. It isn't because she's religious or hates wildness. It isn't even because she hates wildness in him. Well, but look how she's thrown him over for it. No, that wasn't her reason, said the wise Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster. If men only knew it, and it's a good thing they don't, a woman doesn't really care much about whether a man's wild or not if it doesn't affect herself, and Isabelle Amerson doesn't care a thing. Mrs. Foster. No, she doesn't. What she minds is is making a clown of himself in her front yard. It made her think he doesn't care much about her. She's probably mistaken, but that's what she thinks, and it's too late for her to think anything else now because she's going to be married right away. The invitations will be out next week. It'll be a big Amerson-style thing, raw oysters floating in scooped-out blocks of ice and a band from out of town, champagne, showy presents, a colossal present from the Major. Then Wilbur will take Isabelle on the carefulest little wedding trip he can manage, and she'll be a good wife to him, but they'll have the worst spoiled lot of children this town will ever see. How on earth do you make that out, Mrs. Foster? She couldn't love Wilbur, could she, Mrs. Foster demanded, with no challengers. Well, it will all go to her children, and she'll ruin them. The prophetess proved to be mistaken in a single detail merely. Except for that, her foresight was accurate. The wedding was of Ambersonian magnificence, even to the floating oysters, and the Major's colossal present was a set of architects' designs, for a house almost as elaborate and impressive as the mansion, the house to be built in Amberson addition by the Major. The orchestra was certainly not that local one, which had suffered the loss of a base vial. The musicians came, according to the prophecy, and next morning's paper, from afar, and at midnight the bride was still being toasted in champagne, though she had departed upon her wedding journey at ten. Four days later the pair had returned to town, which promptness seemed fairly to demonstrate that Wilbur had indeed taken Isabelle upon the carefulest little trip he could manage. According to every report, she was from the start a good wife to him. But here, in a final detail, the prophecy proved inaccurate. Wilbur and Isabelle did not have children. They had only one. Only one, Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster admitted, but I'd like to know if he isn't spoiled enough for a whole carload. Again she found none to challenge her. At the age of nine, George Amberson Minifer, the Major's one grandchild, was a princely terror, dreaded not only in Amberson addition, but in many other quarters through which he galloped on his white pony. By golly I guess you think you own this town, an embittered labourer complained one day, as Georgie rode the pony straight through a pile of sand the man was sieving. I will when I grow up, the undisturbed child replied. I guess my grandpa owns it now, you bet. And the baffled workman, having no means to controvert what seemed a mere exaggeration of the facts, could only mutter, oh, pull down your vest. Don't have to. Doctor says it ain't healthy. The boy returned, promptly. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll pull down my vest if you'll wipe off your chin. This was Stalk and Stencil, the argot of street battanage of the period, and in such matters Georgie was an expert. He had no vest to pull down. The incongruous fact was that a fringed sash girdled the juncture of his velvet blouse and britches, for the Fauntelroy period had set in, and Georgie's mother had so poor an eye for appropriate things where Georgie was concerned, that she dressed him according to the doctrine of that school in boy decoration. Not only did he wear a silk sash and silk stockings, and a broad lace collar with his little black velvet suit, he had long brown curls and often came home with burrs in them. Except upon the surface, which was not his own work, but his mother's, Georgie bore no vivid resemblance to the fabulous little Cedric. The storied boy's famous Lean on Me, grandfather, would have been difficult to imagine upon the lips of Georgie. A month after his ninth birthday anniversary, when the Major gave him his pony, he had already become acquainted with the toughest boys in various distant parts of the town, and had convinced them that the toughness of a rich little boy with long curls might be considered, in many respects, superior to their own. He fought them, learning how to go berserk, at certain points in a fight, bursting into tears of anger, reaching for rocks, uttering wailed threats of murder and attempting to fulfill them. Fights often led to intimacies, and he acquired the art of saying things more exciting than don't have to, and doctor says it ain't healthy. Thus, on a summer afternoon, a strange boy sitting bored upon the gatepost of the Reverend Malick Smith beheld George Amberson Minnifer rapidly approaching on his white pony, and was impelled by bitterness to shout, shoot the old jackass, look at the girly curls, say, bub, where'd you steal your mother's old sash? Your sister stole it for me, Georgie instantly replied, checking the pony. She stole her far clothesline and gave it to me. You go get your haircuts at the stranger hotly. Yeah, I haven't any sister. I know you haven't at home, Georgie responded. I mean the one that's in jail. I dare you to get down off that pony. Georgie jumped to the ground, and the other boy descended from the Reverend Mr. Smith's gatepost, but he descended inside the gate. I dare you outside that gate, said Georgie. Yeah, I dare you halfway there. I dare you. But these were luckless challenges, for Georgie immediately vaulted the fence, and four minutes later Mrs. Malick Smith, hearing strange noises, looked forth from a window, then screamed and dashed for the pastor's study. Mr. Malick Smith, that grim-bearded Methodist, came to the front yard and found his visiting nephew being rapidly prepared by Master Minnifer to serve as a principal figure in a pageant of massacre. It was with great physical difficulty that Mr. Smith managed to give his nephew a chance to escape into the house, for Georgie was hard and quick, and in such matters remarkably intense. But the minister, after a grotesque tussle, got him separated from his opponent, and shook him. You stopped that you, Georgie cried fiercely, and wrenched himself away. I guess you don't know who I am. Yes, I do know, the angered Mr. Smith retorted. I know who you are, and you're a disgrace to your mother. Your mother ought to be ashamed of herself, to allow, shut up about my mother's being ashamed of herself. Mr. Smith, exasperated, was unable to close the dialogue with dignity. She ought to be ashamed, he repeated, a woman that lets a bad boy like you. But Georgie had reached his pony and mounted. Before setting off at his accustomed gallop, he paused to interrupt the Reverend Malick Smith again. You pull down your vest, you old billy-goat you, he shouted, distinctly. Pull down your vest, wipe off your chin, and go to hell. Such precocity is less unusual, even in children of the rich, than most grown people imagine. However, it was a new experience for the Reverend Malick Smith, and left him in a state of excitement. He at once wrote a note to Georgie's mother, describing the crime according to his nephew's testimony. And the note reached Mrs. Miniver before Georgie did. When he got home, she read it to him sorrowfully. Dear madam, your son has caused a painful distress in my household. He made an unprovoked attack upon a little nephew of mine, who was visiting in my household, insulted him by calling him vicious names and falsehoods, stating that ladies of his family were in jail. He then tried to make his pony kick him, and when the child, who was only eleven years old, while your son is much older and stronger, endeavored to avoid his indignities and withdraw quietly, he pursued him into the enclosure of my property and brutally assaulted him. When I appeared upon this scene, he deliberately called insulting words to me, concluding with profanity such as, go to hell, which was heard not only by myself, but by my wife and the lady who lives next door. I trust such a state of undisciplined behaviour may be remedied for the sake of the reputation for propriety, if nothing higher, of the family to which this unruly child belongs. Georgie had muttered various interruptions, and as she concluded the reading, he said, he's an old liar. Georgie, you mustn't say liar. Isn't this letter the truth? Well, said Georgie, how old am I? Ten. Well, look how he says I'm older than a boy eleven years old. That's true, said Isabel. He does, but isn't some of it true, Georgie? Georgie felt himself to be in a difficulty here, and he was silent. Georgie, did you say what he says you did? Which one? Did you tell him to—to—did you say go to hell? Georgie looked worried for a moment longer, and then he brightened. Listen here, Mama. Grandpa wouldn't wipe his shoe on that old storyteller, would he? Georgie, you mustn't. I mean none of the Ambersons wouldn't have anything to do with him, would they? He doesn't even know you, does he, Mama? That hasn't anything to do with it. Yes, it has. I mean, none of the Amberson family go to see him, and they'll never have him come into their house. They wouldn't ask him to, and they probably wouldn't even let him. That isn't what we're talking about. I bet, said Georgie, emphatically, I bet if he wanted to see any of them he'd have to go round to the old side door. No, dear, they—yes, they would, Mama. So what does it matter if I did say something to him he didn't like? That kind of people? I don't see why you can't say anything you want to him. No, Georgie, and you haven't answered me whether you said that dreadful thing he says you did. Well, said Georgie. Anyway, he said something to me that made me mad. And upon this point he offered no further details. He would not explain to his mother that what had made him mad was Mr. Smith's hasty condemnation of herself. Your mother ought to be ashamed, and a woman that lets a bad boy like you. Georgie did not even consider excusing himself by quoting these insolences. Isabelle stroked his head. They were terrible words for you to use, dear. From his letter he doesn't seem a very tactful person, but— He's just riff-raff, said Georgie. You mustn't say so, his mother gently agreed. Where did you learn those bad words he speaks of? Where did you hear anyone use them? Well, I've heard him several places. I guess Uncle Georg Amberson was the first I ever heard say him. Uncle Georg Amberson said him to Papa once. Papa didn't like it, but Uncle Georg was just laughing at Papa, and then he said him while he was laughing. That was wrong of him, she said, but almost instinctively he detected the lack of conviction in her tone. It was Isabelle's great failing that whatever an Amberson did seemed right to her, especially if the Amberson was either her brother George or her son George. She knew that she should be more severe with the latter now, but severity with him was beyond her power, and the Reverend Malick Smith had succeeded only in rousing her resentment against himself. Georgie's symmetrical face, altogether an Amberson face, had looked never more beautiful to her. It always looked unusually beautiful when she tried to be severe with him. You must promise me, she said feebly, never to use those bad words again. I promise not to, he said promptly, and he whispered an immediate cortisol under his breath, unless I get mad at somebody. This satisfied a code according to which in his own sincere belief he never told lies. That's a good boy, she said, and he ran out into the yard, his punishment over. Some admiring friends were gathered there. They had heard of his adventure, knew of the note, and were waiting to see what was going to happen to him. They hoped for an account of things, and also that he would allow them to take turns riding his pony to the end of the alley and back. They were really his henchmen. Georgie was a lord among boys. In fact, he was a personage among certain sorts of grown people, and was often fond upon. The alley negroes delighted in him, chuckling over him, flattered him slavishly. For that matter he often heard well-dressed people speaking of him admiringly. A group of ladies once gathered about him on the pavement where he was spinning a top. I know, this is Georgie, one exclaimed, and turned to the others with the impressiveness of a showman. Major Amberson's only grandchild. The others said, it is, and made clicking sounds with their mouths, two of them loudly whispering, so handsome. Georgie annoyed because they kept standing upon the circle he had chalked for his top, looked at them coldly, and offered a suggestion. Oh, go hire a haul! As an Amberson he was already a public character, and the story of his adventure in the Reverend Malick Smith's front yard became a town topic. Many people glanced at him with great distaste thereafter when they chanced to encounter him, which meant nothing to Georgie, because he innocently believed most grown people to be necessarily cross-looking as a normal phenomenon resulting from the adult state. And he failed to comprehend that the distasteful glances had any personal bearing upon himself. If he had perceived such a bearing he would have been affected only so far probably as to murder riff-raff. Possibly he would have shouted it, and certainly most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs. Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family. His indignant voice had become audible. Well, who is the most important person at my own grandfather's funeral? And later he had projected his head from the window of the foremost mourner's carriage as the undertaker happened to pass. Riff-raff! There were people, grown people they were, who expressed themselves longingly. They did hope to live to see the day, they said, when that boy would get his comeuppance. They used that honest word so much better than desserts, and not until many years later to be more clumsily rendered as what is coming to him. Something was bound to take him down some day, and they only wanted to be there. But Georgie heard nothing of this, and the yearners for his taking down went unsatisfied, while their yearning grew the greater as the happy day of fulfilment was longer and longer postponed. His grandeur was not diminished by the Malach Smith's story. The rather it was increased, and among other children, especially among little girls, that was added to the prestige of his gilded position that diabolical glamour which must inevitably attend a boy who was told a minister to go to hell. Until he reached the age of twelve, Georgie's education was a domestic process. Tutors came to the house, and those citizens who yearned for his talking down often said, just wait till he has to go to public school, then he'll get it. But at twelve Georgie was sent to a private school in the town, and there came from this small and dependent institution no report or even rumour of Georgie's getting anything that he was thought to deserve. Therefore the yearning still persisted, though growing gaunt with feeding upon itself. For although Georgie's pomposities and impudence in the little school were often almost unbearable, the teachers were fascinated by him. They did not like him, he was too arrogant for that. But he kept them in such a state of emotion that they thought more about him than they did about all the other ten pupils. The emotion he kept them in was usually one resulting from injured self-respect, but sometimes it was dazzled admiration. So far as their conscientious observation went, he studied his lessons sparingly. But sometimes in class he flashed an admirable answer with a comprehension not often shown by the pupils they taught, and he passed his examinations easily. In all, without discernible effort, he acquired at this school some rudiments of a liberal education, and learned nothing whatever about himself. The yearners were still yearning when Georgie at sixteen was sent away to a great prep school. Now, they said brightly, he'll get it. He'll find himself among boys just as important in their hometowns as he is, and they'll knock the stuffing out of him when he puts on his heirs with them. Oh, but that would be worth something to see. They were mistaken, it appeared, for when Georgie returned a few months later he still seemed to have the same stuffing. He had been deported by the authorities, the offence being stated as insolence and profanity. In fact, he had given the principle of the school instructions almost identical with those formally objected to by the Reverend Malick Smith. But he had not got his comeuppance, and those who counted upon it were embittered by his appearance upon the downtown streets driving a dog cart at criminal speed, making pedestrians retreat from the crossings and behaving generally as if he owned the earth. A disgusted hardware dealer of middle age, one of those who hungered for Georgie's downfall, was thus driven back upon the sidewalk to avoid being run over, and so far forgot himself as to make use of the pet street insult of the year. Got any sense? See here, bub, does your mother know you're out? Georgie, without even seeming to look at him, flicked the long lash of his whip dexterously, and a little spurt of dust came from the hardware man's trousers, not far below the waist. He was not made of hardware. He raved, looking for a missile. Then, finding none, commanded himself sufficiently to shout after the rapid dog cart, turn down your pants, you would-be dude, reigning in dear old London, get off the earth. Georgie gave him no encouragement to think that he was heard. The dog cart turned the next corner, causing indignation there likewise, and having proceeded some further distance, halted in front of the Amberson block, an old-fashioned four-story brick warren of lawyer's offices, insurance, and real estate offices, with a dry goods store occupying the ground floor. Georgie tied his lathered trotter to a telegraph pole, and stood for a moment looking at the building critically. It seemed shabby, and he thought his grandfather ought to replace it with a fourteen- story skyscraper, or even a higher one, such as he had lately seen in New York, when he stopped there for a few days of recreation and rest on his way home from the bereaved school. About the entryway to the stairs were various tin signs announcing the occupation and location of upper-floor tenants, and Georgie decided to take some of these with him, if he should ever go to college. However, he did not stop to collect them at this time, but climbed the worn stairs. There was no elevator to the fourth floor. Went down a dark corridor, and rapped three times upon a door. It was a mysterious door, its upper half of opaque glass, bearing no sign to state the business or profession of the occupants within. But overhead upon the lintel, four letters had been smearingly inscribed, partly with purple ink, and partly with a soft lead pencil. F-O-T-A. And upon the plaster wall, above the lintel, there was a drawing dear to male adolescents, a skull and crossbones. Three wraps similar to Georgie's sounded from within the room. Georgie then rapped four times. The wrapper within the room rapped twice, and Georgie rapped seven times. This ended precautionary measures, and a well-dressed boy of sixteen opened the door, whereupon Georgie entered quickly, and the door was closed behind him. Seven boys of congenial age were seated in a semi-circular row of damaged office chairs, facing a platform whereon stood a solemn red-haired young personage with a table before him. At one end of the room there was a battered sideboard, and upon it were some empty beer bottles, a tobacco can about two-thirds full, with a web of mould over the surface of the tobacco, a dusty cabinet photograph, not inscribed, of Ms. Lillian Russell, several withered old pickles, a case knife, and a half-petrified section of icing-cake on a sooty plate. At the other end of the room were two rickety card-tables and a stand of book-shelves, where were displayed under dust four or five small volumes of M. Guy de Mopesson's stories, Robinson Crusoe, Sappho, Mr. Barnes of New York, a work by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Bible, The Arabian Knight's Entertainment, Studies of the Human Form Divine, The Little Minister, and a cluster of monthly magazines and illustrated weeklies of about that Christmas one finds in such articles upon a doctor's anti-room table. Upon the wall above the sideboard was an old-framed lithograph of Ms. Della Fox in Wang. Over the book-shelves there was another lithograph, purporting to represent Mr. John L. Sullivan in a boxing costume, and beside it a half-tone reproduction of a reading from Homer. The final decoration consisted of damaged paper mache, a round shield with two battle-axes and two cross-hilted swords upon the wall over the little platform where stood the red-haired presiding officer. He addressed Georgie in a serious voice. Welcome, friend of the ace! Welcome, friend of the ace! Georgie responded, and all of the other boys repeated the words, Welcome, friend of the ace! Take your seat in the secret semi-circle, said the presiding officer. We will now proceed to— But Georgie was disposed to be informal. He interrupted, turning to the boy who had admitted him. Look here, Charlie Johnson. What's Fred Kinney doing in the President's Chair? That's my place, isn't it? What have you men been up to here, anyhow? Didn't you all agree I was to be President just the same, even if I was away at school? Well, said Charlie Johnson uneasily. Listen, I didn't have much to do with it. Some of the other members thought that long as you weren't in town or anything, and Fred gave the sideboard why Mr. Kinney, presiding, held in his hand in lieu of a gavel and considered much more impressive, a Civil War relic known as a horse-pistol. He rapped loudly for order. All friends of the ace will take their seats, he said sharply. I am President of the FOTA now, George Minifer, and don't you forget it. You and Charlie Johnson sit down because I was elected perfectly fair, and we're going to hold a meeting here. Oh, you are, are you? said George skeptically. Charlie Johnson thought to mollify him. Well, didn't we call this meeting just especially because you told us to? You said yourself we ought to have something of a celebration because you've got back to town, George, and that's what we're here for now, and everything. What do you care about being President? All it amounts to is just calling the roll and— The President de facto hammered the table. This meeting will now proceed to— No, it won't, said George, and he advanced to the desk, laughing contemptuously. Get off that platform. This meeting will come to order, Mr. Kinney commanded fiercely. You put down that gavel, said George. Who's is it? I'd like to know. It belongs to my grandfather, and you quit hammering it that way, or you'll break it, and I'll have to knock your head off. The meeting will come to order. I was legally elected here, and I'm not going to be bulldozed. All right, said Georgie. You're President. Now we'll hold another election. We will not, Fred Kinney shouted. We'll have our regular meeting, and then we'll play Euker, and Nicola Corner, what we're here for. This meeting will now come to order. Georgie addressed the members. I'd like to know who got up this thing in the first place, he said. Who's the founder of the FOTA, if you please? Who got this room rent-free? Who got the janitor to let us have most of this furniture? You suppose you could keep this clubroom a minute if I told my grandfather I didn't want it for a literary club anymore? I'd like to say a word on how you members have been acting, too. When I went away, I said I didn't care if you had a vice president or something while I was gone, but here I hardly turned my back, and you had to go and elect Fred Kinney President. Well, if that's what you want, you can have it. I was going to have a little celebration down here some night pretty soon, and bring some port wine like we drink at school in our crowd there, and I was going to get my grandfather that give the club an extra room across the hall, and probably I could get my Uncle George to give us his old billiard table because he's got a new one, and the club could put it in the other room. Well, you've got a new president now. Here Georgie moved toward the door, and his tone became plaintive, though undeniably there was disdain beneath his sorrow. I guess all I better do is resign. And he opened the door, apparently intending to withdraw. All in favor of having a new election—Charlie Johnson shouted hastily—say aye. Aye was said by every one present except Mr. Kinney, who began a hot protest, but was immediately smothered. All in favor of me being president instead of Fred Kinney, shouted George—say aye. The eyes have it. I resign, said the red-haired boy, gulping as he descended from the platform. I resign from the club. Hot-eyed he found his hat and departed, jeers echoing after him as he plunged down the corridor. Georgie stepped upon the platform and took up the emblem of office. Old red-head Fred will be around next week, said the new chairman. He'll be around bootlicking to get us to take him back in again, but I guess we don't want him. That fellow always was a troublemaker. We will now proceed with our meeting. Well, fellows, I suppose you want to hear from your president. I don't know that I have much to say, as I have already seen most of you a few times since I got back. I had a good time at the old school, back east, but had a little trouble with the faculty and came on home. My family stood by me as well as I could ask, and I expect to stay right here in the old town until whenever I decide to enter college. Now, I don't suppose there's any more business before the meeting. I guess we might as well play cards. Anybody that's game for a little quarter-limit poker, or any limit they say, why I'd like to have him sit at the president's card table. When the diversions of the Friends of the Ace were concluded for that afternoon, Georgie invited his chief supporter, Mr. Charlie Johnson, to drive home with him to dinner, and as they jingled up National Avenue in the dog cart, Charlie asked, What sort of men did you run up against at that school, George? Best crowd there, finest set of men I ever met. How'd you get in with them? Georgie laughed. I let them get in with me, Charlie, he said, in a tone of gentle explanation. It's vulgar to do any other way. Did I tell you the nickname they gave me? King. That's what they called me at that school. King Minifer. How'd they happen to do that? His friend asked, innocently. Oh, different things, Georgie answered lightly. Of course, any of them, that came from anywhere out in this part of the country, knew about the family and all that, and so I suppose it was a good deal on account of— on account of the family, and the way I do things, most likely. End of Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Of the Magnificent Ambersons This Librivant's recording is in the public domain. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington Chapter 4 When Mr. George Amberson Minifer came home for the holidays at Christmastide in his sophomore year, probably no great change had taken place inside him, but his exterior was visibly altered. Nothing about him encouraged any hope that he had received his comeuppance. On the contrary, the yearners for that stroke of justice must yearn even more itchingly. The gilded youth's manner had become polite, but his politeness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to bear. In a word, Mr. Lidoux had returned from the gay life of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal peasants belonging to the old chateau, and their quaint habits and costumes afforded him a mild amusement. Cards were out for a ball in his honour, and this pageant of the tenantry was held in the ballroom of the Amberson mansion the night after his arrival. It was, as Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster said of Isabelle's wedding, a big, Amberson-style thing. Though that wise Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster had long ago gone the way of all wisdom, having stepped out of the Midland town unquestionably into heaven—a long step but not beyond her powers. She had successors, but no successor—the town having grown too large to confess that it was intellectually led and literarily authoritated by one person. And some of these successors were not invited to the ball, for dimensions were now so metropolitan that intellectual leaders and literary authorities loomed in outlying regions unfamiliar to the Ambersons. However, all old citizens recognizable as gentry received cards, and of course so did their dancing descendants. The orchestra and the caterer were brought from far away in the Amberson manor, though this was really a gesture, perhaps one more of habit than of ostentation, for servitors of gaiety as proficient as these importations were nowadays to be found in the town. Even flowers and plants and roped vines were brought from afar. Not, however, until the stock of the local florists proved insufficient to obliterate the interior structure of the big house in the Amberson way. It was the last of the great long-remembered dances that everybody talked about. There were getting to be so many people in town that no later than the next year there were too many for everybody to hear of even such a ball as the Ambersons. George, white-gloved, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, stood with his mother and the major, and bowed in the big red and gold drawing-room downstairs to receive the guests. And, standing thus together, the trio offered a picturesque example of good looks persistent through three generations. The major, his daughter, and his grandson, were of a type all Amberson—tall, straight, and regular, with dark eyes, short noses, good chins, and the grandfather's expression, no less than the grandson's, was one of faintly amused condescension. There was a difference, however. The grandson's unlined young face had nothing to offer except this condescension. The grandfather's had other things to say. It was a handsome, worldly old face, conscious of its importance, but persuasive rather than arrogant, and not without tokens of sufferings withstood. The major's short white hair was parted in the middle like his grandson's, and in all he stood as briskly equipped to the fashion as exquisite young George. Isabelle, standing between her father and her son, caused a vague amazement in the mind of the latter. Her age, just under forty, was for George a thought of something as remote as the moons of Jupiter. He could not possibly have conceived such an age ever coming to be his own. Five years was the limit of his thinking in time. Five years ago he had been a child not yet fourteen, and those five years were an abyss. Five years hence he would be almost twenty-four, what the girls he knew called one of the older men. He could imagine himself at twenty-four, but beyond that his powers staggered and refused the task. He saw a little essential difference between thirty-eight and eighty-eight, and his mother was to him not a woman, but wholly a mother. He had no perception of her other than as an adjunct to himself, his mother, nor could he imagine her thinking or doing anything, falling in love, walking with a friend, reading a book, as a woman, and not as his mother. The woman, Isabelle, was a stranger to her son, as completely a stranger as if he had never in his life seen her or heard her voice, and it was to-night while he stood with her receiving that he caught a disquieting glimpse of this stranger, whom he thus fleetingly encountered from time to time. Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth. That is why the roles of the heroes and heroines of plays are given by the managers to the most youthful actors they can find among the competent. Both middle-aged people and young people enjoy a play about young lovers, but only middle-aged people will tolerate a play about middle-aged lovers. Young people will not come to see such a play, because for them middle-aged lovers are a joke and not a very funny one. Therefore, to bring both the middle-aged people and the young people into his house, the manager makes his romance as young as he can. Youth will indeed be served, and its profound instinct is to be not only scornfully amused but vaguely angered by middle-aged romance. So, standing beside his mother, George was disturbed by a sudden impression, coming upon him out of nowhere so far as he could detect, that her eyes were brilliant, that she was graceful and youthful. In a word, that she was romantically lovely. He had one of those curious moments that seemed to have neither a cause nor any connection with actual things. While it lasted, he was disquieted not by thoughts, for he had no definite thoughts, but by a slight emotion, like that caused in a dream by the presence of something invisible, soundless, and yet fantastic. There was nothing different or new about his mother, except her new black and silver dress. She was standing there beside him, bending her head a little in her greetings, smiling the same smile she had worn for the half hour that people had been passing the receiving group. Her face was flushed, but the room was very warm, and shaking hands with so many people easily accounted for the pretty glow that was upon her. At any time she could have passed for twenty-five or twenty-six. A man of fifty would have honestly guessed her to be about thirty, but possibly two or three years younger. And, though extraordinary in this, she had been extraordinary in it for years. There was nothing in either her looks or her manner to explain George's uncomfortable feeling, and yet it increased, becoming suddenly a vague resentment, as if she had done something unmotherly to him. The fantastic moment passed, and even while it lasted he was doing his duty, greeting two pretty girls with whom he had grown up, as people say, and warmly assuring them that he remembered them very well, an assurance which might have surprised them in anybody but Georgie Minifer. It seemed unnecessary, since he had spent many hours with them no longer ago than the preceding August. They had with them their parents and an uncle from out of town, and George negligently gave the parents the same assurance he had given the daughters, but murmured another form of greeting to the out-of-town uncle, whom he had never seen before. This person George absently took note of as a queer-looking duck. Undergraduates had not yet adopted bird. It was a period previous to that in which a sophomore would have thought of the Sharon Girl's uncle as a queer-looking bird, or perhaps a funny-faced bird. In George's time every human male was to be defined, at pleasure, as a duck, but duck was not spoken with admiring affection, as in its former feminine use to signify a deer. On the contrary duck implied the speaker's personal detachment and humorous superiority. An indifferent amusement was what George felt when his mother, with a gentle emphasis, interrupted his interchange of courtesies with the nieces to present him to the queer-looking duck, their uncle. This emphasis of Isabelle's, though slight, enabled George to perceive that she considered the queer-looking duck a person of some importance, but it was far from enabling him to understand why. The duck parted his thick and longish black hair to the side. His tie was a forgetful-looking thing, and his coat, though it fitted a good enough middle-aged figure, no product of this year, or of last year either. One of his eyebrows was noticeably higher than the other, and there were whimsical lines between them, which gave him an apprehensive expression. But his apprehensions were evidently more humorous than profound, for his prevailing look was that of a genial man of affairs, not much afraid of anything whatever. Nevertheless, observing only his unfashionable hair, his eyebrows, his preoccupied tie, and his old coat, the Olympic George set him down as a queer-looking duck, and having thus completed his portrait, took no interest in him. The Sharon girls passed on, taking the queer-looking duck with them, and George became pink with mortification as his mother called his attention to a white-bearded guest waiting to shake his hand. This was George's great-uncle, Old John Minifer. It was Old John's boast that, in spite of his connection by marriage with the Ambersons, he never had worn, and never would wear, a swallertail coat. Members of his family had exerted their influence uselessly. At eighty-nine, conservative people seldom formed radical new habits, and Old John wore his Sunday suit of black broadcloth to the Amberson ball. The coat was square with skirts to the knees. Old John called it a Prince Albert, and was well enough pleased with it, but his great-nephew considered it the next thing to an insult. George's purpose had been to ignore the man, but he had to take his hand for a moment, whereupon Old John began to tell George that he was looking well, though there had been a time during his fourth month, when he was so puny that nobody thought he would live. The great-nephew, in a flurry of blushes, dropped Old John's hand with some vigor, and seized that of the next person in line. Remember you very well indeed, he said, fiercely. The large room had filled, and so had the broad hall and the rooms on the other side of the hall, where there were tables for wist. The imported orchestra waited in the ballroom on the third floor, but a local harp, cello, violin, and flute were playing airs from the fencing-master in the hall, and people were shouting over the music. Old John Minifer's voice was louder and more penetrating than any other, because he had been troubled with deafness for twenty-five years, heard his own voice but faintly, and liked to hear it. Smell of flowers like this always puts me in mind of funerals, he kept telling his niece, Fanny Minifer, who was with him, and he seemed to get a great deal of satisfaction out of this reminder. His tremulous, yet strident voice cut through the voluminous sound that filled the room, and he was heard everywhere. Always got to think of funerals when I smell so many flowers. And, as the pressure of people forced Fanny and himself against the white marble mantelpiece, he pursued this train of cheery thought, shouting, Right here is where the Major's wife was laid out at her funeral. They had her in a good light from that big bow window. He paused to chuckle mournfully. I suppose that's where they'll put the Major when his time comes. Presently George's mortification was increased to hear this sawmill droning harshly from the midst of the thickening crowd. Ain't the dancing broke out yet, Fanny? Hoop-la! Let's push through and go see the young women folks crack their heels. Start the circus! Hoop-sa-daisy! Miss Fanny Minifer, in charge of the lively veteran, was almost as distressed as her nephew George, but she did her duty, and managed to get old John through the press and out into the broad stairway, which numbers of young people were now ascending to the ballroom. And here the sawmill voice still rose over all others. Solid black walnut every inch of it balustrades in all. Sixty thousand dollars worth of carved woodwork in the house. Like water. Spent money like water. Always did. Still do. Like water. God knows where it all comes from. He continued the ascent, barking and coughing among the gleaming young heads, white shoulders, jewels, and chiffon, like an old dog slowly swimming up the rapids of a sparkling river. While down below in the drawing room George began to recover from the degradation into which this relic of early settler days had dragged him. What restored him completely was a dark-eyed little beauty of nineteen, very knowing in lustrous blue and jet. At sight of this dashing advent in the line of guests before him George was fully in Amberson again. Remember you very well indeed, he said. His graciousness more earnest than any he had heretofore displayed. Isabelle heard him and laughed. But you don't, George, she said. You don't remember her yet, though of course you will. Miss Morgan is from out of town, and I'm afraid this is the first time you've ever seen her. You might take her up to the dancing. I think you've pretty well done your duty here. Be delighted, George responded formally, and offered his arm, not with a flourish, certainly, but with an impressiveness inspired partly by the appearance of the person to whom he offered it, partly by his being the hero of this fate, and partly by his youthfulness, for when manners are new they are apt to be elaborate. The little beauty entrusted her gloved fingers to his coat-sleeve, and they moved away together. Their progress was necessarily slow, and to George's mind it did not lack stateliness. How could it? Musicians hired especially for him were sitting in a grove of palms in the hall, and now tenderly playing O Promise Me for his pleasuring. Dozens and scores of flowers had been brought to life and tended to this hour that they might sweeten the air for him while they died, and the evanescent power that music and floral sense hold over youth stirred his appreciation of strange, beautiful qualities within his own bosom. He seemed to himself to be mysteriously angelic, and about to do something dramatic, which would overwhelm the beautiful young stranger upon his arm. Elderly people and middle-aged people moved away to let him pass with his honoured fare beside him. Worthy middle-class creatures they seemed leading dull lives but appreciative of better things when they saw them. And George's bosom was fleetingly touched with a pitying kindness. And since the primordial day when cast or heritage first set one person in his own esteem above his fellow beings, it is to be doubted if anybody felt ever more illustrious or more negligently grand than George Amberson Minifer felt at this party. As he conducted Miss Morgan through the hall toward the stairway, they passed the open double doors of a card room where some squadrons of older people were preparing for action, and, leaning gracefully upon the mantelpiece of this room, a tall man, handsome, high-mannered, and sparklingly point-device, held laughing converse with that queer-looking duck, the Sharon girl's uncle. The tall gentleman waved a gracious salutation to George, and Miss Morgan's curiosity was stirred. Who is that? I didn't catch his name when my mother presented him to me, said George. You mean the queer-looking duck? I mean the aristocratic duck. That's my uncle George, Honorable George Amberson. I thought everybody knew him. He looks as though everybody ought to know him, she said. It seems to run in your family. If she had any sly intention, it skipped over George harmlessly. Well, of course, I suppose most everybody does, he admitted, out in this part of the country especially. Besides, Uncle George is in Congress. The family like to have someone there. Why? Well, it's sort of a good thing in one way. For instance, my Uncle Sydney Amberson and his wife Aunt Amelia, they haven't got much of anything to do with themselves, get bored to death around here, of course. Well, probably Uncle George will have Uncle Sydney appointed minister or ambassador or something like that to Russia or Italy or somewhere, and that'll make it pleasant when any of the rest of the family go travelling or things like that. I expect to do a good deal of travelling myself when I get out of college. On the stairway he pointed out this prospective ambassadorial couple, Sydney and Amelia. They were coming down, fronting the ascending tide, and as conspicuous over it as a king and a queen and a play. Moreover, as the clear-eyed Miss Morgan remarked, the very least they looked was ambassadorial. Sydney was an Amberson exaggerated, more pompous than gracious. Two portly, flushed, starched to a shine, his stately jowl furnished with an Edward VII beard. Amelia, likewise full-bodied, showed glittering blonde hair exuberantly dressed, a pink fat face cold under a white-hot tiara, a solid cold bosom under a white-hot necklace, great cold-gloved arms, and the rest of her beautifully upholstered. Amelia was an Amberson born herself, Sydney's second cousin. They had no children, and Sydney was without a business or a profession. Thus both found a great deal of time to think about the appropriateness of their becoming excellencies, and as George ascended the broad staircase they were precisely the aunt and uncle he was most pleased to point out to a girl from out of town as his appurtenances in the way of relatives. At sight of them the grandeur of the Amberson family was instantly conspicuous as a permanent thing. It was impossible to doubt that the Ambersons were entrenched in their nobility and riches behind polished and glittering barriers which were as solid as they were brilliant, and would last. The hero of the fate, with the dark-eyed little beauty upon his arm, reached the top of the second flight of stairs, and here beyond a spacious landing where two proud-like darkies tended a crystalline punch-bowl, four wide archways in a rose-vine lattice framed gliding silhouettes of waltzers already smoothly added to the castanets of La Paloma. Old John Minifer, evidently surfetted, was in the act of leaving these delights. Don't want any more of that, he barked, just sliding around. Call that dancing? Rather see a jig any day in the world. They ain't very modest, some of them. I don't mind that, though, not me. Miss Fanny Minifer was no longer in charge of him. He emerged from the ballroom escorted by a middle-aged man of commonplace appearance. The escort had a dry, lined face upon which, not ornamentally, but as a matter of course, there grew a business man's short mustache. And his thin neck showed an Adam's apple, but not conspicuously, for there was nothing conspicuous about him. Baldish, dim, quiet. He was an unnoticeable part of this festival. And although there were a dozen or more middle-aged men present, not casually to be distinguished from him in general respect, he was probably the last person in the big house at whom a stranger would have glanced twice. It did not enter George's mind to mention to Miss Morgan that this was his father, or to say anything whatever about him. Mr. Minifer shook his son's hand unobtrusively in passing. I'll take Uncle John home, he said, in a low voice, then I guess I'll go on home myself. I'm not a great hand at parties, you know. Good night, George. George murmured a friendly enough good night without pausing. Ordinarily he was not ashamed of the Minivers. He seldom thought about them at all, for he belonged, as most American children do, to the mother's family. But he was anxious not to linger with Miss Morgan in the vicinity of Old John whom he felt to be a disgrace. He pushed brusquely through the fringe of calculating youths who were gathered in the arches, watching for chances to dance only with girls who would soon be taken off their hands, and led his stranger lady out upon the floor. They caught the time instantly and were away in the waltz. George danced well, and Miss Morgan seemed to float as part of the music, the very dove itself of La Paloma. They said nothing as they danced. Her eyes were cast down all the while, the prettiest gesture for a dancer, and there was left in the universe for each of them only their companionship in this waltz, while the faces of the other dancers swimming by denoted not people, but merely blurs of color. George became conscious of strange feelings within him, an exultation of soul, tender but indefinite, and seemingly located in the upper part of his diaphragm. The stopping of the music came upon him like the waking to an alarm clock, for instantly six or seven of the calculating persons about the entryways bore down upon Miss Morgan to secure dances. George had to do with one already established as a bell, it seemed. Give me the next one, and the one after that, he said hurriedly, recovering some presence of mind, just as the nearest applicant reached them, and give me every third one for the rest of the evening. She laughed. Are you asking? What do you mean asking? It sounds as though you were just telling me to give you all those dances. Well, I want them, George insisted. What about all the other girls it's your duty to dance with? They'll have to go without, he said, heartlessly. And then, with surprising vehemence, here I want to know, are you going to give me those? Good gracious, she laughed. Yes. The applicants flocked round her, urging contracts for what remained, but they did not dislodge George from her side, though he made it evident that they succeeded in annoying him, and presently he extricated her from an accumulating siege. She must have connived in the extrication, and bore her off to sit beside him, in the stairway that led to the musician's gallery, where they were sufficiently retired, and yet had view of the room. How would all those ducks get to know you so quick, George inquired, with little enthusiasm? Oh, I've been here a week. Looks as if you've been pretty busy, he said. Most of those ducks, I don't know what my mother would want to invite him here for. Don't you like them? Oh, I used to see something of a few of them. I was president of a club we had here, and some of them belonged to it, but I don't care much for that sort of thing any more. I really don't see why my mother invited him. Perhaps it was on account of their parents, Miss Morgan suggested, mildly. Maybe she didn't want to offend their fathers and mothers. Oh, hardly! I don't think my mother need worry much about offending any one in this old town. It must be wonderful, said Miss Morgan. It must be wonderful, Mr. Amberson. Mr. Miniver, I mean. What must be wonderful? To be so important is that. That is an important, George assured her. Anybody that really is anybody ought to be able to do about as they like in their own town, I should think. She looked at him critically from under her shading lashes, but her eyes grew gentler almost at once. In truth they became more appreciative than critical. George's imperious good looks were altogether manly, yet they approached actual beauty as closely as a boy's good looks should dare, and dance music and flowers have some effect upon nineteen-year-old girls as well as upon eighteen-year-old boys. Miss Morgan turned her eyes slowly from George and pressed her face among the lilies of the valley and the violets of the pretty bouquet she carried, while from the gallery above the music of the next dance caroled out merrily in a new two-step. The musicians made the melody gay for the Christmas time with chimes of sleigh bells, and the entrance to the shadowed stairway framed the passing flushed and lively dances, but neither George nor Miss Morgan suggested moving to join the dance. The stairway was drafty, the steps were narrow and uncomfortable, no older person would have remained in such a place. Moreover, these two young people were strangers to each other, neither had said anything in which the other had discovered the slightest intrinsic interest. There had not arisen between them the beginnings of congeniality or even of friendliness. But stairways near ballrooms have more to answer for than have moonlit lakes and mountain sunsets. Someday the laws of glamour must be discovered, because they are so important that the world would be wiser now if Sir Isaac Newton had been hit on the head, not by an apple, but by a young lady. Age, confused by its own long accumulation of follies, is everlastingly inquiring what does she see in him, as if young love came about through thinking or through conduct. Age wants to know what on earth can they talk about, as if talking had anything to do with April rains. At seventy, one gets up in the morning, finds the air sweet under a bright sun, feels lively, thinks, I'm hearty today, and plans to go for a drive. At eighteen, one goes to a dance, sits with a stranger on a stairway, feels peculiar, thinks nothing, and becomes incapable of any plan whatever. Miss Morgan and George stayed where they were. They had agreed to this in silence and without knowing it, certainly without exchanging glances of intelligence. They had exchanged no glances at all. Both sat staring vaguely out into the ballroom, and for a time they did not speak. Over their heads the music reached a climax of vivacity. Drums, symbols, triangle, and sleigh bells, beating, clashing, tinkling. Here and there were to be seen couples so carried away that, ceasing to move at the decorous, even glide, considered most knowing, they pranced and whirled through the throng, from wall to wall, galloping bountiously in abandon. George suffered a shock of vague surprise when he perceived that his aunt, Fannie Minifer, was the lady half of one of these wild couples. Fannie Minifer, who rouged a little, was like fruit, which in some climates drives with the bloom on. Her features had remained prettily childlike, and so had her figure, and there were times when strangers, seeing her across the street, took her to be about twenty. There were other times when, at the same distance, they took her to be about sixty, instead of forty, as she was. She had old days and young days, old hours and young hours, old minutes and young minutes, for the change might be that quick. An alteration in her expression, or a difference in the attitude of her head, would cause astonishing indentations to appear, and behold, Fannie was an old lady. But she had been never more childlike than she was tonight, as she flew over the floor in the capable arms of the queer-looking duck, for this person was her partner. The queer-looking duck had been a real dancer in his day, it appeared, and evidently his day was not yet over. In spite of the headlong, gay rapidity with which he bore Miss Fannie about the big room, he danced authoritatively, avoiding without effort the lightest collision with other couples, maintaining sufficient grace throughout his wildest moments, and all the while laughing and talking with his partner. What was most remarkable to George, and a little irritating, this stranger in the Amerson mansion had no vestige of the air of deference proper to a stranger in such a place. He seemed thoroughly at home. He seemed offensively so, indeed, when passing the entrance to the gallery stairway he disengaged his hand from Miss Fannie's for an instant, and not pausing in the dance waved a laughing salutation more than cordial, then capered lightly out of sight. George gazed stonely at this manifestation, responding neither by word nor sign. How's that for a bit of freshness, he murmured? What was, Miss Morgan asked? That queer-looking duck waving his hand at me like that, except he's the Sharon girl's uncle, I don't know him from Adam. You don't need to, she said. He wasn't waving his hand to you, he meant me. Oh, he did! George was not mollified by the explanation. Everybody seems to mean you. You certainly do seem to have been pretty busy the week you've been here. She pressed her bouquet to her face again, and laughed into it, not displeased. She made no other comment, and for another period neither spoke. Meanwhile the music stopped. Loud applause insisted upon its renewal, and encore was danced. There was an interlude of voices, and the changing of partners began. Well, said George, finally, I must say you don't seem to be much of a prattler. They say it's a great way to get a reputation for being wise, never saying much. Don't you ever talk any? When people can understand, she answered. He had been looking moodily out at the ballroom, but he turned to her quickly at this, saw that her eyes were sunny and content over the top of her bouquet, and he consented to smile. Girls are usually pretty fresh, he said. They ought to go to a man's college about a year. They'd get taught a few things about freshness. What you've got to do after two o'clock to-morrow afternoon. A whole lot of things, every minute filled up. All right, said George, the snow's fine for slaying. I'll come for you in a cutter at ten minutes after two. I can't possibly go. If you don't, he said, I'm going to sit in that cutter in front of the gate, wherever you're visiting, all afternoon, and if you try to go out with anybody else, he's got to whip me before he gets you. And as she laughed, though she blushed a little too, he continued seriously. If you think I'm not an earnest, you're at liberty to make quite a big experiment. She laughed again. I don't think I've often had so large a compliment as that, she said, especially on such short notice, and yet I don't think I'll go with you. You be ready at ten minutes after two. No, I won't. Yes, you will. Yes, she said, I will. And her partner for the next dance arrived, breathless with searching. Don't forget, I've got the third from now, George called after her. I won't. And every third one after that. I know, she called, over her partner's shoulder, and her voice was amused, but meek. When the third from now came, George presented himself before her without any greeting, like a brother or a mannerless old friend. Neither did she greet him, but moved away from him, concluding, as she went, an exchange of bad enage with the preceding partner. She had been talkative enough with him, it appeared. In fact, both George and Miss Morgan talked much more to everyone else that evening than to each other, and they said nothing at all at this time. Both looked preoccupied as they began to dance, and preserved a gravity of expression to the end of the number. And when the third one after that came, they did not dance, but went back to the gallery stairway, seeming to have reached an understanding, without any verbal consultation, that this suburb was again the place for them. Well, said George, coolly, when they were seated. What did you say your name was? Morgan. Funny name. Everyone else's name always is. I didn't mean it was really funny, George explained. That's just one of my crowd's bit of horsing at college. We always say funny name, no matter what it is. I guess we're pretty fresh sometimes, but I knew your name was Morgan, because my mother said so downstairs. I meant, what's the rest of it? Lucy. He was silent. Is Lucy a funny name, too, she inquired? No, Lucy's very much all right, he said, and he went so far as to smile. Even his Aunt Fanny admitted that when George smiled in a certain way he was charming. Thanks about letting my name be Lucy, she said. How old are you, George asked? I don't really know myself. What do you mean you don't really know yourself? I mean, I only know what they tell me. I believe them, of course, but believing isn't really knowing. You believe some certain day as your birthday, at least I suppose you do, but you don't really know what it is because you can't remember. Look here, said George. Do you always talk like this? Miss Lucy Morgan laughed, forgivingly. Put her young head on one side like a bird and responded cheerfully. I'm willing to learn wisdom. What are you studying in school? College. At the university, yes. What are you studying there? George laughed. Lot of useless guff. Then why don't you study some useful guff? What do you mean useful? Something you'd use later in your business or profession. George waved his hand impatiently. I don't expect to go into any business or profession. No? Certainly not. George was emphatic, being sincerely annoyed by such a suggestion, which showed how utterly she failed to comprehend the kind of person he was. Why not, she asked mildly. Just look at him, he said, almost with bitterness, and he made a gesture presumably intended to indicate the business and professional men now dancing within range of vision. That's a fine career for a man, isn't it? Lawyers, bankers, politicians. What do they get out of life, I'd like to know. What do they ever know about real things? Where do they ever get? He was so earnest that she was surprised and impressed. Evidently he had deep-seated ambitions, for he seemed to speak with actual emotion of these despised things which was so far beneath his planning for the future. She had a vague momentary vision of pit at twenty-one, Prime Minister of England, and she spoke involuntarily in a lowered voice with deference. What do you want to be? she asked. George answered promptly. A yachtsman, he said. End of Chapter 5 CHAPTER VI. OF THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Magnificent Ambitions by Booth Tarkington, CHAPTER VI. Having thus, in a word, revealed his ambition for a career above courts, marts, and polling booths, George breathed more deeply than usual, and, turning his face from the lovely companion whom he had just made his confidant, gazed out at the dancers with an expression in which there was both sternness and a contempt for the squalid lives of the unyotted midlanders before him. However, among them he marked his mother, and his sombre grandeur relaxed momentarily. A more genial light came into his eyes. Isabelle was dancing with the queer-looking duck, and it was to be noted that the lively gentleman's gate was more sedate than it had been with Miss Fanny Minifer, but not less dexterous and authoritative. He was talking to Isabelle as gaily as he had talked to Miss Fanny, though with less laughter, and Isabelle listened and answered eagerly. Her colour was high, and her eyes had a look of delight. She saw George and the beautiful Lucy on the stairway and nodded to them. George waved his hand vaguely. He had a momentary return of that inexplicable uneasiness and resentment which had troubled him downstairs. How lovely a mother is, Lucy said. I think she is, he agreed, gently. She's the gracefulest woman in that ballroom. She dances like a girl of sixteen. Most girls of sixteen, said George, are bum dancers. Anyhow, I wouldn't dance with one unless I had to. Well, you'd better dance with your mother. I never saw anybody lovelier. How wonderfully they dance together. Who? Your mother and—and the queer-looking duck, said Lucy. I'm going to dance with him pretty soon. I don't care, so long as you don't give him one of the numbers that belong to me. I'll try to remember, she said, and thoughtfully lifted to her face the bouquet of violets and lilies, a gesture which George noted without approval. Look here, who sent you those flowers you keep making such a fuss over? He did. Who's he? The queer-looking duck. George feared no such rival. He laughed loudly. I suppose he summed old Whittower, he said. The object thus described seeming ignominious enough to a person of eighteen without additional characterization. Some old Whittower. Lucy became serious at once. Yes, he is a Whittower, she said. I ought to have told you before. He's my father. George stopped laughing abruptly. Well, that's a horse on me. If I'd known he was your father, of course I wouldn't have made fun of him. I'm sorry. Nobody could make fun of him, she said quietly. Why couldn't they? It wouldn't make him funny. It would only make themselves silly. Upon this George had a gleam of intelligence. Well, I'm not going to make myself silly any more, then. I don't want to take chances like that with you. But I thought he was the Sharon girl's uncle. He came with them. Yes, she said. I'm always late to everything. I wouldn't let them wait for me. We're visiting the Sharon's. About time I knew that. You forget my being so fresh about your father, will you? Of course he's a distinguished-looking man, in a way. Lucy was still serious. In a way, she repeated. You mean not in your way, don't you? George was perplexed. How do you mean not in my way? People pretty often say, in a way, and rather distinguished-looking, or rather so-and-so, or rather anything, to show that they're superior, don't they? In New York last month I overheard a climber sort of woman speak of me as Little Miss Morgan. But she didn't mean my height. She meant that she was important. Her husband spoke of a friend of mine as Little Miss Depembroke, and Little Miss Depembroke is six feet three. This husband and wife were really so terribly unimportant that the only way they knew to pretend to be important was calling people Little Miss or Mr. So-and-So. It's a kind of snob-slaying, I think. Of course people don't always say rather or, in a way, to be superior. I should say not. I use both of them a great deal myself, said George. One thing I don't see, though. What's the use of a man being six feet three? Men that size can't handle themselves as well as a man of five feet eleven and a half can. Those long, gangling men, they're nearly always too kind of wormy to be any good in athletics, and they're so awkward they keep falling over chairs or— Mr. Pembroke is in the army, said Lucy, primly. He's extraordinarily graceful. In the army? Oh, well, I suppose he's some old friend of your father's. They got on well, she said, after I introduced them. George was a straightforward soul, at least. See here, he said. Are you engaged to anybody? No. Not wholly mollified he shrugged his shoulders. You seem to know a good many people. Do you live in New York? No, we don't live anywhere. What do you mean you don't live anywhere? We've lived all over, she said. Papa used to live here in this town, but that was before I was born. What do you keep moving around so for? Is he a promoter? No, he's an inventor. What's he invented? Just lately, said Lucy, he's been working on a new kind of horseless carriage. Well, I'm sorry for him, George said, in no unkindly spirit. Those things are never going to amount to anything. People aren't going to spend their lives lying on their backs in the road and letting grease strip in their faces. Horseless carriages are pretty much a failure, and your father better not waste his time on them. Papa would be so grateful, she returned, if he could have your advice. Instantly, George's face became flushed. I don't know that I've done anything to be insulted for, he said. I don't see that what I said was particularly fresh. No indeed. Then what do you— She laughed gaily. I don't, and I don't mind your being such a lofty person at all. I think it's ever so interesting. Papa's a great man. Is he? George decided to be good-natured. Well, let us hope so. I hope so, I'm sure. Looking at him keenly, she saw that the magnificent youth was incredibly sincere in this bit of graciousness. He spoke as a tolerant, elderly statesman might speak of a promising young politician, and with her eyes still upon him Lucy shook her head in gentle wonder. I'm just beginning to understand, she said. And what? What it means to be a real Amberson in this town. Papa told me something about it before we came, but I see he didn't say half enough. George superbly took this all for tribute. Did your father say he knew the family before he left here? Yes, I believe he was particularly a friend of your uncle George, and he didn't say so, but I imagine he must have known your mother very well, too. He wasn't an inventor then. He was a young lawyer. The town was smaller in those days, and I believe he was quite well known. I daresay I've no doubt the family are all very glad to see him back, especially if they used to have him at the house a good deal, as he told you. I don't think he meant to boast of it, she said. He spoke of it quite calmly. George stared at her for a moment in perplexity, then, perceiving that her intention was satirical. Girls really ought to go to a man's college, she said, just a month or two anyhow, and it takes some of that freshness out of him. I can't believe it, she retorted, as her partner for the next dance arrived. It would only make them a little politer on the surface. They'd be really just as awful as ever, even after you got to know them. What do you mean after you got to know them? She was departing to the dance. Janie and Mary Sharon told me all about what sort of a little boy you were, she said, over her shoulder. You must think it out. She took wing away on the breeze of the waltz, and George, having stared gloomily after her for a few moments, postponed filling an engagement, and strolled round the fluctuating outskirts of the dance to where his uncle, George Amberson, stood smilingly watching under one of the rose-vine arches at the entrance to the room. Hello, young namesake, said the uncle. Why lingers the laggard heel of the dancer, haven't you got a partner? She's sitting around waiting for me somewhere, said George. See here, who was this fellow Morgan that Aunt Fannie Minifer was dancing with a while ago? Amberson laughed. He's a man with a pretty daughter, Georgie. Missemed you've been spending the evening noticing something of that sort? Or do I err? Never mind, what sort is he? I think we'll have to give him a character, Georgie. He's an old friend, used to practice law here. Perhaps he had more debts than cases, but he paid them all up before he left town. Your question is purely mercenary, I take it. You want to know his true worth before proceeding further with the daughter. I cannot inform you, though I notice signs of considerable prosperity in that becoming dress of hers. However, you can never tell. It is an age when every sacrifice is made for the young, and how your own poor mother managed to provide those genuine pearl studs for you out of her allowance from father. I can't— Oh, dry up! said the nephew. I understand this Morgan. Mr. Eugene Morgan, his uncle suggested. Politeness requires that the young should—I guess the young didn't know much about politeness in your day, George interrupted. I understand that Mr. Eugene Morgan used to be a great friend of the family. Oh, the minifers, the uncle inquired, with apparent innocence. No, I seem to recall that he and your father were not. I mean the Ambersons, George said impatiently. I understand he was a good deal around the house here. What's your objection to that, George? What do you mean, my objection? You seem to speak with a certain crossness. Well, said George, I meant he seems to feel awfully at home here, the way he was dancing with Aunt Fanny. Amberson laughed. I'm afraid your Aunt Fanny's heart was stirred by ancient recollections, Georgie. You mean she used to be silly about him? She wasn't considered singular, said the uncle. He was—he was popular. Could you bear a question? What do you mean, could I bear? I only wanted to ask, do you take this same passionate interest in the parents of every girl you dance with? Perhaps it's a new fashion we old bachelors ought to take up. Is it the thing this year? Oh, go on, said George, moving away. I only wanted to know. He left the sentence unfinished and crossed the room to where a girl sat waiting for his nobility to find time to fulfill his contract with her for this dance. Pardon for keep wait, he muttered, as she rose brightly to meet him, and she seemed pleased that he came at all, but George was used to girls looking radiant when he danced with them, and she had little effect upon him. He danced with her perfunctorily, thinking the while of Mr. Eugene Morgan and his daughter. Strangely enough, his thoughts dwelt more upon the father than the daughter, though George could not possibly have given a reason even to himself for this disturbing preponderance. By a coincidence, though not an odd one, the thoughts and conversation of Mr. Eugene Morgan at this very time were concerned with George Amberson Minnifer. Rather casually, it's true. Mr. Morgan had retired to a room set apart for smoking on the second floor, and had found a grizzled gentleman lounging in solitary possession. Gene Morgan, this person exclaimed, rising with great hardiness. I'd heard you were in town. I don't believe you know me. Yes, I do, Fred Kinney. Mr. Morgan returned with equal friendliness. Your real face—the one I used to know—it's just underneath the one you're masquerading in tonight. You ought to have changed it more if you wanted a disguise. Twenty years, said Mr. Kinney. It makes some difference in faces, but more in behaviour. It does so, his friend agreed, with explosive emphasis. My own behaviour began to be different about that long ago, quite suddenly. I remember, said Mr. Kinney, sympathetically. Well, life's odd enough as we look back. Probably it's going to be odd or still if we could look forward. Probably—they sat and smoked. However, Mr. Morgan remarked presently, I still dance like an Indian, don't you? No, I leave that to my boy Fred. He does the dancing for the family. I suppose he's upstairs, hard at it? Nope, he's not here. Mr. Kinney glanced toward the open door and lowered his voice. He wouldn't come. It seems a couple of years or so ago he had a row with young Georgie Minifer. Fred was president of a literary club they had, and he said this young Georgie got himself elected instead in an overbearing sort of way. Fred's red-headed, you know. I suppose you remember his mother. You were at the wedding. I remember the wedding, said Mr. Morgan, and I remember your bachelor dinner. Most of it, that is. Well, my boy Fred's is red-headed now, Mr. Kinney went on, as his mother was then, and he's very bitter about his row with Georgie Minifer. He says he'd rather burn his foot off than set it inside any Amberson house or any place else where young Georgie is. Fact is, the boy seemed to have so much feeling over it I had my doubts about coming myself, but my wife said it was all nonsense. We mustn't humor Fred and grudge over such a little thing. And while she despised that Georgie Minifer herself as much as anyone else did, she wasn't going to miss a big Amberson show just on account of a boy's rumpus, and so on and so on, and so we came. Do people dislike young Minifer, generally? I don't know about generally. I guess he gets plenty of toadying, but there's certainly a lot of people that are glad to express their opinions about him. What's the matter with him? Too much Amberson, I suppose, for one thing, and for another his mother just fell down and worshipped him from the day he was born. That's what beats me. I don't have to tell you what Isabelle Amberson is, you Jean Morgan. She's got a touch of the Amberson high stuff about her, but you can't get anybody that ever knew her to deny that she's just about the finest woman in the world. No, said Eugene Morgan. You can't get anybody to deny that. Then I can't see how she doesn't see the truth about that boy. He thinks he's a little tin god on wheels, and honestly it makes some people weary and sick just to think about him. Yet that high-spirited, intelligent woman, Isabelle Amberson, actually sits and worships him. You can hear it in her voice when she speaks to him, or speaks of him. You can see it in her eyes when she looks at him. My lord, what does she see when she looks at him? Morgan's odd expression of genial apprehension deepened whimsically, though it denoted no actual apprehension whatever, and cleared away from his face altogether when he smiled. He became surprisingly winning and persuasive when he smiled. He smiled now, after a moment, at this question of his old friend. She sees something that we don't see, he said. What does she see? An angel. Kenny laughed aloud. Well, if she sees an angel when she looks at Georgie Minifer, she's a funnier woman than I thought she was. Perhaps she is, said Morgan, but that's what she sees. My lord, it's easy to see you've only known him an hour or so. In that time, have you looked at Georgie and seen an angel? No. All I saw was a remarkably good-looking fool boy with the pride of Satan, and a set of nice new drawing-room manners that he probably couldn't use more than half an hour at a time without bursting. Then what— Mothers are right, said Morgan. Do you think this young Georg is the same sort of creature when he's with his mother, that he is when he's bulldozing your boy Fred? Mothers see the angel in us, because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat, the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil, and she's entirely right about that. Kenny laughed and put his hand on his friend's shoulder. I remember what a fellow you always were to argue, he said. You mean Georgie Miniver is as much of an angel as any murderer is, and that Georgie's mother is always right. I'm afraid she has always been, Morgan said, lightly. The friendly hand remained upon his shoulder. She was wrong once, old fellow, at least so it seemed to me. No, said Morgan, a little awkwardly. No. Kenny relieved the slight embarrassment that had come upon both of them. He laughed again. Wait till you know young Georgie a little better, he said. Something tells me you're going to change your mind about his having an angel to show, if you see anything of him. You mean beauty's in the eye of the beholder, and the angel is all in the eye of the mother. If you were a painter, Fred, you would paint mothers with angels' eyes holding imps in their laps. Me? I'll stick to the old masters and the cherubs. Mr. Kenny looked at him musingly. Somebody's eyes must have been pretty angelic, he said, if they've been persuading you that Georgie Minifer is a cherub. They are, said Morgan heartily. They're more angelic than ever. And as a new flourish of music sounded overhead he threw away his cigarette and jumped up briskly. Goodbye, I've got this dance with her. With whom? With Isabelle. The grizzled Mr. Kenny affected to rub his eyes. It startles me you're jumping up like that to go and dance with Isabelle Amberson. Twenty years seem to have passed, but have they? Tell me, have you danced with poor old Fanny too this evening? Twice. My Lord, Kenny groaned, half an earnest, old time starting all over again, my Lord. Old times! Morgan laughed gaily from the doorway. Not a bit. There aren't any old times. When times are gone, they're not old, they're dead. There aren't any times, but new times. And he vanished in such a manner that he seemed all ready to have begun dancing. CHAPTER VII The appearance of Miss Lucy Morgan the next day, as she sat in George's fast cutter, proved so charming that her escort was stricken to soft words instantly, and failed to control a poetic impulse. Her rich little hat was trimmed with black fur. Her hair was almost as dark as the fur. A great boa of black fur was about her shoulders. Her hands were vanished into a black muff, and George's laprobe was black. You look like, he said, your face looks like—it looks like a snowflake on a lump of coal. I mean a snowflake that would be a rose-leaf too. Perhaps you'd better look at the rains, she returned. We almost upset just then. George declined to heed this advice. "'Because there's too much pink in your cheeks for a snowflake,' he continued. "'What's that fairy story about Snow White and Rose Red?' "'We're going pretty fast, Mr. Minifer.' "'Well, you see, I'm only here for two weeks.' "'I mean the sleigh,' she explained. "'We're not the only people on the street, you know.' "'Oh, they'll keep out of the way. That's very patrician charioteering. But it seems to me a horse like this needs guidance. I'm sure he's going almost twenty miles per hour.' "'That's nothing,' said George. But he consented to look forward again. He controd under three minutes all right.' He laughed. "'I suppose your father thinks he can build a horseless carriage to go that fast.' "'They go that fast already sometimes.' "'Yes,' said George. "'They do, for about a hundred feet. Then they give a yell and burn up.' "'Evidently she decided not to defend her father's faith in horseless carriages, for she laughed and said nothing. The cold air was polka-dotted with snowflakes and trembled to the loud, continuous jingling of sleigh bells. Boys and girls, all aglow and panting jets of vapor, darted at the passing sleighs to ride on the runners, or sought to rope their sleds to any vehicle whatever. But the fleetest no more than just touched the flying cutter, though a hundred soggy mittens grasped for it, then reeled and whirled till sometimes the wearers of those daring mittens plunged flat in the snow and lay a sprawl, reflecting. For this was the holiday time, and all the boys and girls in town were out, most of them on National Avenue. But there came panting and chugging up that flat thoroughfare, a thing which some day was to spoil all their sleigh-time merriment, save for the rashest and most disobedient. It was vaguely like a topless surrey, but cumbrous with unwholesome excrescences for and aft, while underneath were spinning leather belts and something that whirred and howled and seemed to stagger. The ride-stealers made no attempt to fasten their sleds to a contrivance so nonsensical and yet so fearsome. Instead they gave over their sport and concentrated all their energies in their lungs, so that up and down the street the one cry shrilled increasingly. Get a haas! Get a haas! Get a haas! Mister, why don't you get a haas? But the mahood in charge, sitting solitary on the front seat, was unconcerned. He laughed, and now and then ducked a snowball without losing any of his good nature. It was Mr. Eugene Morgan, who exhibited so cheerful accountants between the forward visor of a deer-stalker cap and the collar of a fuzzy grey ulster. Get a haas! the children shrieked, and gruffer voices joined them. Get a haas! Get a haas! Get a haas! George Minnifer was correct thus far. The twelve miles an hour of such a machine would never overtake George's trotter. The cutter was already scurrying between the stone pillars at the entrance to Amberson Addition. "'That's my grandfather's,' said George, nodding toward the Amberson Mansion. "'I ought to know that,' Lucy exclaimed. "'We stayed there late enough last night. Papa and I were almost the last to go. He and your mother and Miss Fanny Minnifer got the musicians to play on other waltz when everybody else had gone downstairs, and the fiddles were being put away in their cases. Papa danced part of it with Miss Minnifer and the rest with your mother. Miss Minnifer's your aunt, isn't she? Yes, she lives with us. I tease her a good deal. "'What about?' "'Oh, anything handy. Whatever's easy to tease an old maid about.' "'Doesn't she mind?' "'She usually has sort of a grouch on me,' laughed George. "'Nothing much. That's our house, just beyond grandfather's.' He waved a seal-skin gauntlet to indicate the house Major Amberson had built for Isabelle as a wedding gift. "'It's almost the same as grandfather's, only not as large and hasn't got a regular ballroom. We gave the dance last night at grandfather's on account of the ballroom, and because I'm the only grandchild, you know. Of course, some day that'll be my house, though I expect my mother will most likely go on living where she does now, with my father and Aunt Fanny. I suppose I'll probably build a country-house, too, somewhere east, I guess.' He stopped speaking and frowned as they passed a closed carriage and pair. The body of this comfortable vehicle sagged slightly to one side. The paint was old and seemed with hundreds of minute cracks, like little rivers on a black map. The coachman, a fat and elderly darkie, seemed to drowse upon the box, but the open window afforded the occupants of the cutter a glimpse of a tired, fine old face, a silk hat, a pearl tie, and an astrakhan collar evidently out to take the air. "'There's your grandfather now,' said Lucy. "'Isn't it?' George's frown was not relaxed. Yes, it is, and he ought to give that rat-trap away and sell those old horses. They were disgrace all shaggy, not even clipped. I suppose he doesn't notice it. People get awful funny when they get old. They seem to lose their self-respect, sort of.' He seemed a real brummel to me, she said. "'Oh, he keeps up about what he wears well enough. But, well, look at that!' He pointed to a statue of Minerva, one of the cast-iron sculptures that Major Amberson had set up in opening the edition years before. Minerva was intact, but a blackish streak descended unpleasantly from her forehead to the point of her straight nose, and a few other streaks were sketched in a repellent ding upon the folds of her drapery. "'That must be from Soot,' said Lucy. "'There are so many houses around here. Anyhow, somebody ought to see that these statues are kept clean. My grandfather owns a good many of these houses, I guess, for renting. Of course, he sold most of the lots. There aren't any vacant ones, and there used to be heaps of them when I was a boy. Another thing I don't think he ought to allow. A good many of these people bought big lots, and they built houses on them. Then the price of land kept getting higher, and they'd sell part of their yards, and let the people that bought it build houses on it to live in, till they haven't hardly any of them got big open yards any more, and it's getting all too much built up. The way it used to be, it was like a gentleman's country estate, and that's the way my grandfather ought to keep it. He lets these people take too many liberties. They do anything they want to." "'But how could he stop them?' Lucy asked, surely with reason. If he sold them the land, it's theirs, isn't it?' George remained serene in the face of this apparently difficult question. He ought to have all the tradespeople boycott the families that sell part of their yards that way. All he'd have to do would be to tell the tradespeople they wouldn't get any more orders from the family if they didn't do it." "'From the family? What family?' "'Our family,' said George, unperturbed. The Ambersons.' "'I see,' she murmured, and evidently she did see something that he did not, for as she lifted her muff to her face, he asked, "'Why are you laughing now?' "'Why?' "'You always seem to have some little secret of your own to get happy over.' "'Always,' she exclaimed. "'What a big word when we only met last night.' "'That's another case of it,' he said, with obvious sincerity. "'One of the reasons I don't like you—much—is you've got that way of seeming quietly superior to everybody else.' "'I,' she cried. "'I have.' "'Oh, you think you keep it sort of confidential to yourself, but it's plain enough. I don't believe in that kind of thing.' "'You don't?' "'No,' said George emphatically. "'Not with me. I think the world's like this. There's a few people that their birth and position and so on puts them at the top, and they ought to treat each other entirely as equals.' His voice betrayed a little emotion, as he added. "'I wouldn't speak like this to everybody.' "'You mean you're confiding your deepest creed or code or whatever it is to me?' "'Go on, make fun of it, then,' George said bitterly. "'You do think you're terribly clever. It makes me tired.' "'Well, as you don't like my seeming quietly superior after this, I'll be noisily superior,' she returned cheerfully. "'We aim to please.' "'I had a notion before I came for you today that we were going to quarrel,' he said. "'No, we won't. It takes two.' She laughed and waved her muff toward a new house, not quite completed, standing in a field upon their right. They had passed beyond Amherston addition, and were leaving the northern fringes of the town for the open country. "'Isn't that a beautiful house?' she exclaimed. "'Papa and I call it our beautiful house.' George was not pleased. "'Does it belong to you?' "'Of course not. Papa brought me out here the other day, driving in his machine, and we both loved it. It's so spacious and dignified and plain. "'Yes, it's plain enough,' George grunted. "'Yet it's lovely. The grey-green roof and shutters give just enough colour with the trees for the long white walls. It seems to me the finest house I've seen in this part of the country.' George was outraged by an enthusiasm so ignorant. Not ten minutes ago they had passed the Amherston mansion. "'Is that a sample of your taste in architecture?' he asked. "'Yes, why? Because it strikes me you better go somewhere and study the subject a little.' Lucy looked puzzled. "'What makes you have so much feeling about it? Have I offended you?' "'Affended nothing,' George returned, brusquely. Girls usually think they know it all as soon as they've learned to dance and dress and flirt a little. They never know anything about things like architecture. That house is about as bummerhouse as any house I ever saw.' "'Why?' "'Why?' George repeated. "'Did you ask me why?' "'Yes.' "'Well, for one thing,' he paused. "'For one thing?' "'Well, just look at it. I shouldn't think you'd have to do any more than look at it if you'd ever given any attention to architecture.' "'What is the matter with its architecture, Mr. Minifer?' "'Well, it's this way,' said George. "'It's like this.' "'Well, for instance, that house?' "'Well, it was built like a townhouse.' He spoke of it in the past tense because they had now left it far behind them, a human habit of curious significance. It was like a house meant for a street in the city. What kind of a house was that for people of any taste to build out here in the country?' "'But Papa said it's built that way on purpose. There are a lot of other houses being built in this direction, and Papa says the city's coming out this way. In a year or two that house will be right in town.' "'It was a bum house anyhow,' said George crossly. "'I don't even know the people that are building it. They say a lot of riff-raff come to town every year nowadays, and there's other riff-raff that have always lived here, and have made a little money and act as if they own the place.' Uncle Sidney was talking about it yesterday. He says he and some of his friends are organizing a country club, and already some of these riff-raff are warming into it, people he's never heard of at all. Anyhow, I guess it's pretty clear you don't know a great deal about architecture.' She demonstrated the completeness of her amiability by laughing. "'I'll know something about the North Pole before long,' she said, if we keep going much farther in this direction.' "'At this,' he was remorseful. "'All right, we'll turn and drive south a while till you get warmed up again. I expect we have been going against the wind about long enough. Indeed, I'm sorry.' He said, indeed, I'm sorry, in a nice way, and looked very strikingly handsome when he said it, she thought. No doubt it is true that there is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner repented than over all the saints who consistently remain holy, and the rare sudden gentleness of arrogant people have infinitely more effect than the continual gentleness of gentle people. Arrogance turned gentle melts the heart, and Lucy gave her companion a little side-long, sunny nod of acknowledgement. George was dazzled by the quick glow of her eyes, and found himself at a loss for something to say. Having turned around, he kept his horse to a walk, and at this gate the sleigh bells tinkled but intermittently, gleaming wanly through the whitish vapor that kept rising from the trotter's body and flanks. They were like tiny fog bells, and made the only sounds in a great winter silence. The white road ran between lonesome rail fences, and frozen barnyards beyond the fences showed sometimes a harrow left to rust, with its iron seat half filled with stiffened snow, and sometimes an old dead buggy its wheels forever set, it seemed, in the solid ice of deep ruts. Chickens scratched the metallic earth with an air of protest, and a masterless ragged colt looked up in sudden horror at the mild tinkle of the passing bells, then blew fierce clouds of steam at the sleigh. The snow no longer fell, and far ahead, in a grayish cloud that lay upon the land, was the town. Lucy looked at this distant thickening reflection. When we get this far out we can see there must be quite a little smoke hanging over the town, she said. I suppose that's because it's growing. As long as it grows bigger it seems to get ashamed of itself, so it makes this cloud and hides in it. Papa says it used to be a bit nicer when he lived here. He always speaks of it differently. He always has a gentle look, and a particular tone of voice, I've noticed. He must have been very fond of it. It must have been a lovely place, everyone must have been so jolly. From the way he talks you would think that life here was just one long mid-summer serenade. He declares that it was always sunshiny, that the air wasn't like the air anywhere else. That, as he remembers it, there always seemed to be gold dust in the air. I doubt it. I think it doesn't seem to be duller air to him now, just on account of having a little soot in it sometimes, but probably because he was twenty years younger then. It seems to me the gold dust he thinks was here is just his being young that he remembers. I think it was just youth. It is pretty pleasant to be young, isn't it? She laughed absently, then appeared to become wistful. I wonder if we really do enjoy it as much as we'll look back and think we did. I don't suppose so. Anyhow, for my part, I feel as if I must be missing something about it somehow, because I don't ever seem to be thinking about what's happening at the present moment. I'm always looking forward to something, thinking about things that will happen when I'm older. You're a funny girl, George said, gently, but your voice sounds pretty nice when you think and talk along together like that. The horse shook himself all over, and the impatient sleigh-bells made his wish audible. Accordingly, George tightened the reins, and the cutter was off again at a three-minute trot, no despicable rate of speed. It was not long before they were again passing Lucy's beautiful house, and here George thought fit to put an appendix to his remark. You're a funny girl, and you know a lot, but I don't believe you know much about architecture. Coming toward them, black against the snowy road, was a strange silhouette. It approached moderately and without visible means of progression, so the matter seemed from a distance. But as the cutter shortened that distance, the silhouette was revealed to be Mr. Morgan's hoarseless carriage, conveying four people atop, Mr. Morgan, with George's mother beside him, and in the rear seat Miss Fanny Minnifer and the honourable George Amberson. All four seemed to be in the liveliest humour, like high-spirited people upon a new adventure, and Isabel waved her handkerchief dashingly as the cutter flashed past them. For the Lord's sake, George gasped. Your mother's a dear, said Lucy, and she does wear the most bewitching things. She looked like a Russian princess, though I doubt if they're that handsome. George said nothing. He drove on till they had crossed Amberson Addition and reached the stone pillars at the head of National Avenue. There he turned. Let's go back and take another look at that old sewing machine, he said. It certainly is the weirdest craziest. He left the sentence unfinished, and presently they were again in sight of the old sewing machine. George shouted, mockingly. Alas, three figures stood in the road, and a pair of legs, with the toes turned up, indicated that a fourth figure lay upon its back in the snow, beneath a hoarseless carriage that had decided to need a horse. George became vociferous with laughter, and, coming up at his trotter's best gate, snow spraying from runners and every hoof swerved to the side of the road and shot by, shouting, Get a horse! Get a horse! Get a horse! Three hundred yards away he turned and came back, racing, leaning out as he passed to wave jeeringly at the group about the disabled machine. Get a horse! Get a horse! Get a— The trotter had broken into a gallop, and Lucy cried a warning. Be careful, she said. Look where you're driving. There's a ditch on that side. Look! George turned too late. The cutter's right runner went into the ditch and snapped off. The little sleigh upset, and after dragging its occupants some fifteen yards, left them lying together in a bank of snow. Then the vigorous young horse kicked himself free of all annoyances, and disappeared down the road, galloping cheerfully.