Miss Amberson also laughed at this brother, the next day, but for the suitor it was a different matter: she refused to see him when he called to apologize.

"You seem to care a great deal about bass viols!" he wrote her.

"I promise never to break another." She made no response to the note, unless it was an answer, two weeks later, when her engagement was announced.

She took the persistent one, Wilbur Minafer, no breaker of bass viols or of hearts, no serenader at all.
A few people, who always foresaw everything, claimed that they were not surprised, because though Wilbur Minafer "might not be an Apollo, as it were," he was "a steady young business man, and a good church-goer," and Isabel Amberson was "pretty sensible--for such a showy girl." But the engagement astounded the young people, and most of their fathers and mothers, too; and as a topic it supplanted literature at the next meeting of the "Women's Tennyson Club." "Wilbur Minafer!" a member cried, her inflection seeming to imply that Wilbur's crime was explained by his surname.

"Wilbur Minafer! It's the queerest thing I ever heard! To think of her taking Wilbur Minafer, just because a man any woman would like a thousand times better was a little wild one night at a serenade!" "No," said Mrs.Henry Franklin Foster.