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Updated: May 12, 2025
Fanny Minafer broke the long silence with a sound from her throat, a stilled gasp; and with that great companion of hers, her handkerchief, retired softly to the loneliness of her own chamber. After she had gone George looked about him bleakly, then on tiptoe crossed the hall and went into his own room, which was filled with twilight.
Minafer inquired, not looking up. "They're coming," said his son; and, casting himself heavily into a chair, stared at the fire. His prediction was verified a few moments later; the two ladies came in cheerfully, unfastening their fur cloaks. "It's all right, Georgie," said Isabel. "Your Uncle George called to us that Pendennis got home safely.
The fantastic moment passed; and even while it lasted, he was doing his duty, greeting two pretty girls with whom he had grown up, as people say, and warmly assuring them that he remembered them very well an assurance which might have surprised them "in anybody but Georgie Minafer!"
This was the old Minafer house. George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime.
A slight change shadowed the face of Eugene; his look of happy anticipation gave way to something formal and polite. "How do you do, George," he said. "Mrs. Minafer expects to go driving with me, I believe if you'll be so kind as to send her word that I'm here." George made not the slightest movement. "No," he said.
Altogether, this heavy work of heavy art, smoked dry, hugely scabbed, cracked, and crumbling, was a dismal sight to the distracted eye of George Amberson Minafer, and its present condition of craziness may have added a mite to his own.
All the way to New York it seemed to him that Isabel was near him, and he wrote of her to Lucy from his hotel the next night: I saw an account of the accident to George Minafer. I'm sorry, though the paper states that it was plainly his own fault. I suppose it may have been as a result of my attention falling upon the item that I thought of his mother a great deal on the way here.
George said quickly. "Don't do that! Mother mustn't do that. It wouldn't look well." "Wouldn't look well!" Fanny mocked him; and her suppressed vehemence betrayed a surprising acerbity. "See here, Georgie Minafer, I suggest that you just march straight on into your room and finish your dressing! Sometimes you say things that show you have a pretty mean little mind!"
He felt some gratification: he had done a little to put the man in his place that man whose influence upon his daughter was precisely the same thing as a contemptuous criticism of George Amberson Minafer, and of George Amberson Minafer's "ideals of life." Lucy's going away without a word was intended, he supposed, as a bit of punishment.
And in that unexpected, racking grief of his son, Wilbur Minafer became more vividly George's father than he had ever been in life. When George left the room, his arm was about his black-robed mother, his shoulders were still shaken with sobs.
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