look at that brick stable! Most
folks would think that stable plenty big enough and good enough to live
in; it's got running water and four rooms upstairs for two hired men and
one of 'em's family to live in. They keep one hired man loafin' in the
house, and they got a married hired man out in the stable, and his wife
does the washing. They got box-stalls for four horses, and they keep
a coupay, and some new kinds of fancy rigs you never saw the beat of!
'Carts' they call two of 'em--'way up in the air they are--too high for
me! I guess they got every new kind of fancy rig in there that's been
invented. And harness--well, everybody in town can tell when Ambersons
are out driving after dark, by the jingle. 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. Seems to me it would go against a
person's stomach, just before supper like that, and anyway tea isn't fit
for much--not unless you're sick or something. My wife says Ambersons
don't make lettuce salad the way other people do; they don't chop it
up with sugar and vinegar at all. They pour olive oil on it with their
vinegar, and they have it separate--not along with the rest of the meal.
And they eat these olives, too: green things they are, something like a
hard plum, but a friend of mine told me they tasted a good deal like a
bad hickory-nut. My wife says she's going to buy some; you got to eat
nine and then you get to like 'em, she says. Well, I wouldn't eat nine
bad hickory-nuts to get to like them, and I'm going to let these olives
alone. Kind of a woman's dish, anyway, I suspect, but most everybody'll
be makin' a stagger to worm through nine of 'em, now Ambersons brought
'em to town. Yes, sir, the rest'll eat 'em, whether they get sick or
not! Looks to me like some people in this city'd be willing to go crazy
if they thought that would help 'em to be as high-toned as Ambersons.
Old Aleck Minafer--he's about the closest old codger we got--he come
in my office the other day, and he pretty near had a stroke tellin' me
about his daughter Fanny. Seems Miss Isabel Amberson's got some kind of
a dog--they call it a Saint Bernard--and Fanny was bound to have one,
too. Well, old Aleck told her