“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 says any damn thing that comes into her head! That’s all there is to it.”
“But she said,” George persisted wretchedly; “she said there was talk. She said—”
“Look here, young fellow!” Amberson laughed good-naturedly. “There probably is some harmless talk about the way your Aunt Fanny goes after poor Eugene, and I’ve no doubt I’ve abetted it myself. People can’t help being amused by a thing like that. Fanny was always languishing at him, twenty-odd years ago, before he left here. Well, we can’t blame the poor thing if she’s got her hopes up again, and I don’t know that I blame her, myself, for using your mother the way she does.”
“How do you mean?”
Amberson put his hand on George’s shoulder. “You like to tease Fanny,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tease her about this, if I were you. Fanny hasn’t got much in her life. You know, Georgie, just being an aunt isn’t really the great career it may sometimes appear to you! In fact, I don’t know of anything much that Fanny has got, except her feeling about Eugene. She’s always had it—and what’s funny to us is pretty much life-and-death to her, I suspect. Now, I’ll not deny that Eugene Morgan is attracted to your mother. He is; and that’s another case of ‘always was’; but I know him, and he’s a knight, George—a crazy one, perhaps, if you’ve read ‘Don Quixote.’ And I think your mother likes him better than she likes any man outside her own family, and that he interests her more than anybody else—and ‘always has.’ And that’s all there is to it, except—”