[The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington]@TWC D-Link book
The Magnificent Ambersons

CHAPTER IV
11/15

The little beauty entrusted her gloved fingers to his coat-sleeve, and they moved away together.
Their progress was necessarily slow, and to George's mind it did not lack stateliness.

How could it?
Musicians, hired especially for him, were sitting in a grove of palms in the hall and now tenderly playing "Oh, Promise Me" for his pleasuring; dozens and scores of flowers had been brought to life and tended to this hour that they might sweeten the air for him while they died; and the evanescent power that music and floral scents hold over youth stirred his appreciation of strange, beautiful qualities within his own bosom: he seemed to himself to be mysteriously angelic, and about to do something which would overwhelm the beautiful young stranger upon his arm.
Elderly people and middle-aged people moved away to let him pass with his honoured fair beside him.

Worthy middle-class creatures, they seemed, leading dull lives but appreciative of better things when they saw them--and George's bosom was fleetingly touched with a pitying kindness.

And since the primordial day when caste or heritage first set one person, in his own esteem, above his fellow-beings, it is to be doubted if anybody ever felt more illustrious, or more negligently grand, than George Amberson Minafer felt at this party.
As he conducted Miss Morgan through the hall, toward the stairway, they passed the open double doors of a card room, where some squadrons of older people were preparing for action, and, leaning gracefully upon the mantelpiece of this room, a tall man, handsome, high-mannered, and sparklingly point-device, held laughing converse with that queer-looking duck, the Sharon girls' uncle.

The tall gentleman waved a gracious salutation to George, and Miss Morgan's curiosity was stirred.


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