s youthfulness--for when manners are
new they are apt to be elaborate. 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. "Who is
that?"

"I didn't catch his name when my mother presented him to me," said
George. "You mean the queer-looking duck."

"I mean the aristocratic duck."

"That's my Uncle George Honourable George Amberson. I thought everybody
knew him."

"He looks as though everybody ought to know him," she said. "It seems to
run in your family."

If she had any sly intention, it skipped over George harmlessly. "Well,
of course, I suppose most everybody does," he admitted--"out in this
part of the country especially. Besides, Uncle George is in Congress;
the family like to have someone there."