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 he didn't like dogs except rat-terriers, because a rat-