Booth Tarkington

“ I don’t have to tell you what Isabel Amberson is, Eugene 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 weak and sick just to think about him! Yet that high-spirited, intelligent woman, Isabel Amberson, actually sits and worships him! ”

“ Lucy protested, laughing at his dramatic intensity. “Of course I am! How long have I been looking forward to it?”
“I don’t know,” he said sharply, abating nothing of his fierceness. “How long have you?”
“Why—ever since you went away!”
“Is that true? Lucy, is that true?”
“You are funny!” she said. “Of course it’s true. Do tell me what’s the matter with you, George!”
“I will!” he exclaimed. “I was a boy when I saw you last. I see that now, though I didn’t then. Well, I’m not a boy any longer. I’m a man, and a man has a right to demand a totally different treatment.” ”

“ 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 gentlenesses 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 sidelong, sunny nod of acknowledgment. George was dazzled by the quick glow of her eyes, and found himself at a loss for something to say.
Having turned about, he kept his horse to a walk, and at this gait the sleighbells tinkled but intermittently. ”

“ If she ever thinks of me she probably imagines I’m still dancing in the ballroom at the Amberson Mansion, and she probably thinks of the Mansion as still beautiful—still the finest house in town. Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. And when they’re gone we can’t tell where—or what the devil we did with ’em! But I believe I’ll say now—while there isn’t much time left for either of us to get embarrassed about it—I believe I’ll say that I’ve always been fond of you, Georgie, but I can’t say that I always liked you. ”

“ Isabel said, reverting to George’s remark, and overlooking Fanny’s. “What makes me laugh so much at nothing is Eugene’s factory. Wouldn’t anybody be delighted to see an old friend take an idea out of the air like that—an idea that most people laughed at him for—wouldn’t any old friend of his be happy to see how he’d made his idea into such a splendid, humming thing as that factory—all shiny steel, clicking and buzzing away, and with all those workmen, such muscled looking men and yet so intelligent looking?” ”

“ Christmas day is the children’s, but the holidays are youth’s dancing-time. The holidays belong to the early twenties and the ’teens, home from school and college. These years possess the holidays for a little while, then possess them only in smiling, wistful memories of holly and twinkling lights and dance-music, and charming faces all aglow. It is the liveliest time in life, the happiest of the irresponsible times in life. Mothers echo its happiness—nothing is like a mother who has a son home from college, except another mother with a son home from college. ”

“ You know how a wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner—and then, in such a little while, it isn’t there at all; nothing is left but the sky, and the sky keeps on being just the same forever.”
“It strikes me you’re getting mixed up,” said George cheerfully. “I don’t see much resemblance between time and the sky, or between things and smoke-wreaths; but I do see one reason you like Lucy Morgan so much. ”

“ She came and sat upon the arm of his chair. “Papa, why should George behave like that?”
“He’s sensitive.”
“Rather! But why is he? He does anything he likes to, without any regard for what people think. Then why should he mind so furiously when the least little thing reflects upon him, or on anything or anybody connected with him?”
Eugene patted her hand. “That’s one of the greatest puzzles of human vanity, dear; and I don’t pretend to know the answer. In all my life, the most arrogant people that I’ve known have been the most sensitive. ”

“ All the people were soiled by the smoke-mist through which they hurried, under the heavy sky that hung close upon the new skyscrapers; and nearly all seemed harried by something impending, though here and there a woman with bundles would be laughing to a companion about some adventure of the department stores, or perhaps an escape from the charging traffic of the streets—and not infrequently a girl, or a free-and-easy young matron, found time to throw an encouraging look to George. ”

“ George, white-gloved, with a gardenia in his buttonhole, stood with his mother and the Major, embowered 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. ”

“ Elderly people and middle-aged people moved away to let him pass with his honoured fair 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 caste or heritage first set one person, in his own esteem, above his fellow-beings, it is to be doubted if anybody ever felt more illustrious, or more negligently grand, than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party. ”

“ Lucy shook her head despairingly. “You are the queerest person! You say you’re a man now, but you talk more like a boy than ever. What does make you so excited?”
“‘Excited!’” he stormed. “Do you dare to stand there and call me ‘excited’? I tell you, I never have been more calm or calmer in my life! I don’t know that a person needs to be called ‘excited’ because he demands explanations that are his simple due!”
“What in the world do you want me to explain?”
“Your conduct with Fred Kinney!” George shouted.
Lucy uttered a sudden cry of laughter ”

“ Do you think I can believe you really care for him? I don’t! You are my mother and you’re an Amberson—and I believe you’re too proud! You’re too proud to care for a man who could write such a letter as that!” He stopped, faced her, and spoke with more self-control: “Well, what are you going to do about it, mother?”
George was right about his mother’s being proud. And even when she laughed with a negro gardener, or even those few times in her life when people saw her weep, Isabel had a proud look—something that was independent and graceful and strong. ”

“ George was never more furious; he felt that he was “making a spectacle of himself”; and no young gentleman in the world was more loath than George Amberson Minafer to look a figure of fun. And while he stood there, undeniably such a figure, with Janie and Mary Sharon threatening to burst at any moment, if laughter were longer denied them. Lucy sat looking at him with her eyebrows delicately lifted in casual, polite inquiry. ”

“ 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—a snowflake that would be a rose-leaf, too!” ”

“ There was one border section of the city which George never explored in his Sunday morning excursions. This was far out to the north where lay the new Elysian Fields of the millionaires, though he once went as far in that direction as the white house which Lucy had so admired long ago—her “Beautiful House.” George looked at it briefly and turned back, rumbling with an interior laugh of some grimness. The house was white no longer; nothing could be white which the town had reached, and the town reached far beyond the beautiful white house now. ”

“ The apartment house suited Fanny and swallowed her.
The city was so big, now, that people disappeared into it unnoticed, and the disappearance of Fanny and her nephew was not exceptional. People no longer knew their neighbours as a matter of course; one lived for years next door to strangers—that sharpest of all the changes since the old days—and a friend would lose sight of a friend for a year, and not know it.
One May day George thought he had a glimpse of Lucy. ”

“ In truth, the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man, skinned, to show his busy works, yet wearing a few barbaric ornaments; and such a figure carved, coloured, and discoloured, and set up in the market-place, would have done well enough as the god of the new people. Such a god they had indeed made in their own image, as all peoples make the god they truly serve; though of course certain of the idealists went to church on Sunday, and there knelt to Another, considered to be impractical in business. ”

“ 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-age 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. ”

“ So how on earth could she have had anything but a happy life? People that aren’t happy don’t look cheerful all the time, do they? They look unhappy if they are unhappy; that’s how they look! See here”—he faced her challengingly—“do you deny that I did the right thing?”
“Oh, I don’t pretend to judge,” Fanny said soothingly, for his voice and gesture both partook of wildness. “I know you think you did, George.” ”

“ George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime. He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile. This was a fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in dress. ”

“ Lucy whispered, giggling. “Aren’t they sentimental”
“People that age always are,” George returned. “They get sentimental over anything at all. Factories or restaurants, it doesn’t matter what!”
And both of them were seized with fits of laughter which they managed to cover under the general movement of departure, as Isabel had risen to go.
Outside, upon the crowded street, George helped Lucy into his runabout, and drove off, waving triumphantly, and laughing at Eugene who was struggling with the engine of his car, in the tonneau of which Isabel and Fanny had established themselves. ”

“ And in his reverie he saw like a pageant before him the magnificence of the Ambersons—its passing, and the passing of the Ambersons themselves. They had been slowly engulfed without knowing how to prevent it, and almost without knowing what was happening to them. The family lot, in the shabby older quarter, out at the cemetery, held most of them now; and the name was swept altogether from the new city. But the new great people who had taken their places—the Morgans and Akerses and Sheridans—they would go, too. George saw that. ”

“ He was not so cocksure, half an hour later, on an open road, when a siren whistle wailed behind him, and before the sound had died away, Eugene’s car, coming from behind with what seemed fairly like one long leap, went by the runabout and dwindled almost instantaneously in perspective, with a lace handkerchief in a black-gloved hand fluttering sweet derision as it was swept onward into minuteness—a mere white speck—and then out of sight.
George was undoubtedly impressed. “Your Father does know how to drive some,” the dashing exhibition forced him to admit. ”

“ George turned pale.
“Eat your dinner, Georgie,” his aunt said sweetly. “Food will do you good. I didn’t say I knew this rumour was true. I only said I’d heard it.”
“When? When did you hear it!”
“Oh, months ago!” And Fanny found any further postponement of laughter impossible.
“Fanny, you’re a hard-hearted creature,” Isabel said gently. “You really are. Don’t pay any attention to her, George. Fred Kinney’s only a clerk in his uncle’s hardware place: he couldn’t marry for ages—even if anybody would accept him!” ”