fact, he was a personage among certain sorts of grown people, and was
often fawned upon; the alley negroes delighted in him, chuckled over
him, flattered him slavishly. For that matter, he often heard well-
dressed people speaking of him admiringly: a group of ladies once
gathered about him on the pavement where he was spinning a top. "I
know this is Georgie!" one exclaimed, and turned to the others with
the impressiveness of a showman. "Major Amberson's only grandchild!"
The others said, "It is?" and made clicking sounds with their mouths;
two of them loudly whispering, "So handsome!"

Georgie, annoyed because they kept standing upon the circle he had
chalked for his top, looked at them coldly and offered a suggestion:

"Oh, go hire a hall!"

As an Amberson, he was already a public character, and the story of
his adventure in the Reverend Malloch Smith's front yard became a town
topic. Many people glanced at him with great distaste, thereafter,
when they chanced to encounter him, which meant nothing to Georgie,
because he innocently believed most grown people to be necessarily
cross-looking as a normal phenomenon resulting from the adult state;
and he failed to comprehend that the distasteful glances had any
personal bearing upon himself. If he had perceived such a bearing, he
would have been affected only so far, probably, as to mutter,
"Riffraff!" Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most
people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs.
Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven. Georgie was reported to
have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his
indignant voice had become audible: "Well, who is the most important
person at my own grandmother's funeral?" And later he had projected