The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington (top novels of all time TXT) 📗

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 o’ 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 a suggestion which showed how utterly she failed to comprehend the kind of person he was.

“Why not?” she asked mildly.

“Just look at ’em!” 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 were so far beneath his planning for the future. She had a vague, momentary vision of Pitt, 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.

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 unyachted Midlanders before him. However, among them, he marked his mother; and his sombre grandeur relaxed momentarily; a more genial light came into his eyes.

Isabel was dancing with the queer-looking duck; and it was to be noted that the lively gentleman’s gait was more sedate than it had been with Miss Fanny Minafer, but not less dexterous and authoritative. He was talking to Isabel as gaily as he had talked to Miss Fanny, though with less laughter, and Isabel 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 your 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 makin’ such a fuss over?”

“He did.”

“Who’s ‘he’?”

“The queer-looking duck.”

George feared no such rival; he laughed loudly. “I s’pose he’s some old widower!” he said, the object thus described seeming ignominious enough to a person of eighteen, without additional characterization. “Some old widower!”

Lucy became serious at once. “Yes, he is a widower,” 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 girls’ 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 Sharons.”

“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 speaking 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 Mr. Pembroke’ and ‘little Mr. Pembroke’ 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 Mister so-and-so. It’s a kind of snob slang, 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 ’em 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 about 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, I suppose he’s some old friend of your father’s.”

“They got on very well,” she said, “after I introduced them.”

George