"Probably his mind is full of pictures of his youth, or the
Civil War, and the days when he and mother were young married people
and all of us children were jolly little things--and the city was a
small town with one cobbled street and the others just dirt roads with
board sidewalks." This was George Amberson's conjecture, and the
others agreed; but they were mistaken. The Major was engaged in the
profoundest thinking of his life. No business plans which had ever
absorbed him could compare in momentousness with the plans that
absorbed him now, for he had to plan how to enter the unknown country
where he was not even sure of being recognized as an Amberson--not
sure of anything, except that Isabel would help him if she could. His
absorption produced the outward effect of reverie, but of course it
was not. The Major was occupied with the first really important
matter that had taken his attention since he came home invalided,
after the Gettysburg campaign, and went into business; and he realized
that everything which had worried him or delighted him during this
lifetime between then and to-day--all his buying and building and
trading and banking--that it all was trifling and waste beside what
concerned him now.
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