The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington [best android ereader .TXT] 📗

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 colour. George became conscious of strange feelings within him: an exaltation 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 belle, it seemed.

“Give me the next 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 the rest of the evening.”

She laughed. “Are you asking?”

“What do you mean, ‘asking’?”

“It sounded as though you were just telling me to give you all those dances.”

“Well, I want ’em!” 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 upon the stairway that led to the musicians’ gallery, where they were sufficiently retired, yet had a view of the room.

“How’d 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’d been pretty busy!” he said. “Most of those ducks, I don’t know what my mother wanted to invite ’em here for.”

“Don’t you like them?”

“Oh, I used to see something of a few of ’em. I was president of a club we had here, and some of ’em 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 ’em.”

“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 anybody in this old town.”

“It must be wonderful,” said Miss Morgan. “It must be wonderful, Mr. Amberson⁠—Mr. Minafer, I mean.”

“What must be wonderful?”

“To be so important as that!”

“That isn’t ‘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 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 violets of the pretty bouquet she carried, while, from the gallery above, the music of the next dance carolled out merrily in a new two-step. The musicians made the melody gay for the Christmastime with chimes of sleighbells, and the entrance to the shadowed stairway framed the passing flushed and lively dancers, but neither George nor Miss Morgan suggested moving to join the dance.

The stairway was draughty: 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. Some day 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 am 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, cymbals, triangle, and sleighbells, 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 bounteously in abandon. George suffered a shock of vague surprise when he perceived that his aunt, Fanny Minafer, was the lady-half of one of these wild couples.

Fanny Minafer, who rouged a little, was like fruit which in some climates dries with the bloom on. Her features had remained prettily childlike; so had her figure, and there were times when strangers, seeing her across the street, took her to be about twenty; they were other times when at