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By Root 1007 0

alley he had fought with two boys at the same time, and whipped them; in that front yard he had been successfully teased into temporary insanity by a Sunday-school class of pinky little girls. On that sagging porch a laughing woman had fed him and other boys with doughnuts and gingerbread; yonder he saw the staggered relics of the iron picket fence he had made his white pony jump, on a dare, and in the shabby, stone-faced house behind the fence he had gone to children’s parties, and, when he was a little older he had danced there often, and fallen in love with Mary Sharon, and kissed her, apparently by force, under the stairs in the hall. The double front doors, of meaninglessly carved walnut, once so glossily varnished, had been painted smoke gray, but the smoke grime showed repulsively, even on the smoke gray; and over the doors a smoked sign proclaimed the place to be a “Stag Hotel.”

Other houses had become boarding-houses too genteel for signs, but many were franker, some offering “board by the day, week or meal,” and some, more laconic, contenting themselves with the label: “Rooms.” One, having torn out part of an old stone-trimmed bay window for purposes of commercial display, showed forth two suspended petticoats and a pair of oyster-coloured flannel trousers to prove the claims of its black-and-gilt sign: “French Cleaning and Dye House.” Its next neighbour also sported a remodelled front and permitted no doubt that its mission in life was to attend cosily upon death: “J. M. Rolsener. Caskets. The Funeral Home.” And beyond that, a plain old honest four-square gray-painted brick house was flamboyantly decorated with a great gilt scroll on the railing of the old-fashioned veranda: “Mutual Benev’t Order Cavaliers and Dames of Purity.” This was the old Minafer house.

George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson Minafer known aforetime. He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile. This was a fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in dress. The ladies of this party were favourably affected at sight of the pedestrian upon the sidewalk, and, as the machine was moving slowly, and close to the curb, they had time to observe him in detail, which they did with a frankness not pleasing to the object of their attentions. “One sees so many nice-looking people one doesn’t know nowadays,” said the youngest of the young ladies. “This old town of ours is really getting enormous. I shouldn’t mind knowing who he is.”

“I don’t know,” the youth beside her said, loudly enough to be heard at a considerable distance. “I don’t know who he is, but from his looks I know who he thinks he is: he thinks he’s the Grand Duke Cuthbert!” There was a burst of tittering as the car gathered speed and rolled away, with the girl continuing to look back until her scandalized companions forced her to turn by pulling her hood over her face. She made an impression upon George, so deep a one, in fact, that he unconsciously put his emotion into a muttered word:

“Riffraff!”

This was the last “walk home” he was ever to take by the route he was now following: up National Avenue to Amberson Addition and the two big old houses at the foot of Amberson Boulevard; for tonight would be the last night that he and Fanny were to spend in the house which the Major had forgotten to deed to Isabel. To-morrow they were to “move out,” and George was to begin his work in Bronson’s office. He had not come to this collapse without a fierce struggle—but the struggle was inward, and the rolling world was not agitated by it, and rolled calmly on. For of all the “ideals of life” which the world, in its rolling, inconsiderately flattens out to nothingness, the least likely to retain a profile