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The Sharon girls passed on, taking the queer-looking duck with them, and George became pink with mortification as his mother called his attention to a white-bearded guest waiting to shake his hand. This was George's great-uncle, old John Minafer: it was old John's boast that in spite of his connection by marriage with the Ambersons, he never had worn and never would wear a swaller-tail coat.
"He ought to have all the trades-people boycott the families that sell part of their yards that way. All he'd have to do would be to tell the trades-people they wouldn't get any more orders from the family if they didn't do it." "From 'the family'? What family?" "Our family," said George, unperturbed. "The Ambersons."
"I mean the Ambersons," George said impatiently. "I understand he was a good deal around the house here." "What is your objection to that, George?" "What do you mean: my objection?" "You seemed to speak with a certain crossness." "Well," said George, "I meant he seems to feel awfully at home here. The way he was dancing with Aunt Fanny " Amberson laughed.
Major Amberson had "made a fortune" in 1873, when other people were losing fortunes, and the magnificence of the Ambersons began then. Magnificence, like the size of a fortune, is always comparative, as even Magnificent Lorenzo may now perceive, if he has happened to haunt New York in 1916; and the Ambersons were magnificent in their day and place.
From the chuckling exordium of The Magnificent Ambersons it is but a step to The Age of Innocence and Main Street. Little reflective as he has allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation alone succeeded in writing not a few chapters which have texture, substance, "thickness."
The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them under to the last vestige; and it mattered little that George guessed easily enough that most of the five hundred Most Prominent had paid something substantial "to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc." the Five Hundred had heaved the final shovelful of soot upon that heap of obscurity wherein the Ambersons were lost forever from sight and history.
This town never did see so much style as Ambersons are putting on, these days; and I guess it's going to be expensive, because a lot of other folks'll try to keep up with 'em. The Major's wife and the daughter's been to Europe, and my wife tells me since they got back they make tea there every afternoon about five o'clock, and drink it.
He's reckless, and even if he is arrogant and conceited and bad-tempered, he's awfully generous." "Oh, he's an Amberson," said her father. "The Ambersons aren't saving. They're too much the other way, most of them." "I don't think I should have called George bad-tempered," Lucy said thoughtfully. "No. I don't think he is." "Only when he's cross about something?"
"I wonder if I was like that!" 'Amberson groaned. "You don't suppose every Amberson has had to go through it, do you?" "Don't worry! At least half of it is a combination of youth, good looks, and college; and even the noblest Ambersons get over their nobility and come to be people in time. It takes more than time, though."
She had successors, but no successor; the town having grown too large to confess that it was intellectually led and literarily authoritated by one person; and some of these successors were not invited to the ball, for dimensions were now so metropolitan that intellectual leaders and literary authorities loomed in outlying regions unfamiliar to the Ambersons.
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