not to go upstairs until this interview was over. His decision was the result of no timidity, nor of a too sensitive delicacy. What he felt was, that if he interrupted the scene in his grandfather's room, just at this time, one of the three gentlemen engaging in it might speak to him in a peremptory manner (in the heat of the moment) and George saw no reason for exposing his dignity to such mischances. Therefore he turned from the stairway, and going quietly into the library, picked up a magazine—but he did not open it, for his attention was instantly arrested by his Aunt Amelia's voice, speaking in the next room. The door was open and George heard her distinctly.
“Isabel does? Isabel!” she exclaimed, her tone high and shrewish. “You needn't tell me anything about Isabel Minafer, I guess, my dear old Frank Bronson! I know her a little better than you do, don't you think?”
George heard the voice of Mr. Bronson replying—a voice familiar to him as that of his grandfather's attorney-in-chief and chief intimate as well. He was a contemporary of the Major's, being over seventy, and they had been through three years of the War in the same regiment. Amelia addressed him now, with an effect of angry mockery, as “my dear old Frank Bronson”; but that (without the mockery) was how the Amberson family almost always spoke of him: “dear old Frank Bronson.” He was a hale, thin old man, six feet three inches tall, and without a stoop.
“I doubt your knowing Isabel,” he said stiffly. “You speak of her as you do because she sides with her brother George, instead of with you and Sydney.”
“Pooh!” Aunt Amelia was evidently in a passion. “You know what's been going on over there, well enough, Frank Bronson!”
“I don't even know what you're talking about.”
“Oh, you don't? You don't know that Isabel takes George's side simply because he's Eugene Morgan's best friend?”
“It seems to me you're talking pure nonsense,” said Bronson sharply. “Not impure nonsense, I hope!”
Amelia became shrill. “I thought you were a man of the world: don't tell me you're blind! For nearly two years Isabel's been pretending to chaperone Fanny Minafer with Eugene, and all the time she's been dragging that poor fool Fanny around to chaperone her and Eugene! Under the circumstances, she knows people will get to thinking Fanny's a pretty slim kind of chaperone, and Isabel wants to please George because she thinks there'll be less talk if she can keep her own brother around, seeming to approve. 'Talk!' She'd better look out! The whole town will be talking, the first thing she knows! She—”
Amelia stopped, and stared at the doorway in a panic, for her nephew stood there.
She kept her eyes upon his white face for a few strained moments, then, regaining her nerve, looked away and shrugged her shoulders.
“You weren't intended to hear what I've been saying, George,” she said quietly. “But since you seem to—”
“Yes, I did.”
“So!” She shrugged her shoulders again. “After all, I don't know but it's just as well, in the long run.”
He walked up to where she sat. “You—you—” he said thickly. “It seems—it seems to me you're—you're pretty common!”
Amelia tried to give the impression of an unconcerned person laughing with complete indifference, but the sounds she produced were disjointed and uneasy. She fanned herself, looking out of the open window near her. “Of course, if you want to make more trouble in the family than we've already got, George, with your eavesdropping, you can go and repeat—”
Old Bronson had risen from his chair in great distress. “Your aunt was talking nonsense because she's piqued over a business matter, George,” he said. “She doesn't mean what she said, and neither she nor any one else gives the slightest credit to such foolishness—no one in the world!”
George gulped, and wet lines shone suddenly along his lower eyelids. “They—they'd better not!” he said, then stalked out of the room, and out of the house. He stamped fiercely across the stone slabs of the front porch, descended the steps, and halted abruptly, blinking in the strong sunshine.
In front of his own gate, beyond the Major's broad lawn, his mother was just getting into her victoria, where sat already his Aunt Fanny and Lucy Morgan. It was a summer fashion-picture: the three ladies charmingly dressed, delicate parasols aloft; the lines of the victoria graceful as those of a violin; the trim pair of bays in glistening harness picked out with silver, and the serious black driver whom Isabel, being an Amberson, dared even in that town to put into a black livery coat, boots, white breeches, and cockaded hat. They jingled smartly away, and, seeing George standing on the Major's lawn, Lucy waved, and Isabel threw him a kiss.
But George shuddered, pretending not to see them, and stooped as if searching for something lost in the grass, protracting that posture until the victoria was out of hearing. And ten minutes later, George Amberson, somewhat in the semblance of an angry person plunging out of the Mansion, found a pale nephew waiting to accost him.
“I haven't time to talk, Georgie.”
“Yes, you have. You'd better!”
“What's the matter, then?”
His namesake drew him away from the vicinity of the house. “I want to tell you something I just heard Aunt Amelia say, in there.”
“I don't want to hear it,” said Amberson. “I've been hearing entirely too much of what 'Aunt Amelia says, lately.”
“She says my mother's on your side about this division of the property because you're Eugene Morgan's best friend.”
“What in the name of heaven has that got to do with your mother's being on my side?”
“She said—” George paused to swallow. “She said—” He faltered.
“You look sick,” said his uncle; and laughed shortly. “If it's because of anything Amelia's been saying, I don't blame you! What else did she say?”
George swallowed again, as with nausea, but under his uncle's encouragement he was able to be explicit. “She said my mother wanted you to be friendly to her about Eugene Morgan. She said my mother had been using Aunt Fanny as a chaperone.”
Amberson emitted a laugh of disgust. “It's wonderful what tommy-rot a woman in a state of spite can think of! I suppose you don't doubt that Amelia Amberson created this specimen of tommy-rot herself?”
“I know she did.”
“Then what's the matter?”
“She said—” George faltered again. “She said—she implied people were—were talking about it.”
“Of all the damn nonsense!” his uncle exclaimed. George looked at him haggardly. “You're sure they're not?”
“Rubbish! Your mother's on my side about this division because she knows Sydney's a pig and always has been a pig, and so has his spiteful wife. I'm trying to keep them from getting the better of your mother as well as from getting the better of me, don't you suppose? Well, they're in a rage because Sydney always could do what he liked with father unless your mother interfered, and they know I got Isabel to ask him not to do what they wanted. They're keeping up the fight and they're sore—and Amelia's a woman who always
