“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.”