"What! Why, we saw you, right in the middle of the fourth row!"
"Yes," she said, smiling, "but I was sitting just behind Isabelle
Amberson. I couldn't look at anything except her wavy brown hair and
the wonderful back of her neck."
The ineligible young men of the town (they were all ineligible) were
unable to content themselves with the view that had so charmed Mrs.
Henry Franklin Foster: they spent their time struggling to keep Miss
Amberson's face turned toward them. She turned it most often,
observers said, toward two: one excelling in the general struggle by
his sparkle, and the other by that winning if not winsome old trait,
persistence. The sparkling gentleman "led germans" with her, and sent
sonnets to her with his bouquets--sonnets lacking neither music nor
wit. He was generous, poor, well-dressed, and his amazing
persuasiveness was one reason why he was always in debt. No one
doubted that he would be able to persuade Isabel, but he unfortunately
joined too merry a party one night, and, during a moonlight serenade
upon the lawn before the Amberson Mansion, was easily identified from
the windows as the person who stepped through the bass viol and had to
be assisted to a waiting carriage.
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