“Do people dislike young Minafer 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 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! 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.”
Kinney laughed aloud. “Well, if she sees an angel when she looks at Georgie Minafer, she’s a funnier woman than I thought she was!”