Another citizen said an eloquent thing about Miss Isabel Amberson's
looks. This was Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster, the foremost literary
authority and intellectual leader of the community---for both the
daily newspapers thus described Mrs. Foster when she founded the
Women's Tennyson Club; and her word upon art, letters, and the drama
was accepted more as law than as opinion. Naturally, when "Hazel
Kirke" finally reached the town, after its long triumph in larger
places, many people waited to hear what Mrs. Henry Franklin Foster
thought of it before they felt warranted in expressing any estimate of
the play. In fact, some of them waited in the lobby of the theatre,
as they came out, and formed an inquiring group about her.

"I didn't see the play," she informed them.

"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