his head from the window of the foremost mourners' carriage, as the
undertaker happened to pass.

"Riffraff!"

There were people--grown people they were--who expressed themselves
longingly: they did hope to live to see the day, they said, when that
boy would get his come-upance! (They used that honest word, so much
better than "deserts," and not until many years later to be more
clumsily rendered as "what is coming to him.") Something was bound to
take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there! But
Georgie heard nothing of this, and the yearners for his taking down
went unsatisfied, while their yearning grew the greater as the happy
day of fulfilment was longer and longer postponed. His grandeur was
not diminished by the Malloch Smith story; the rather it was
increased, and among other children (especially among little girls)
there was added to the prestige of his gilded position that diabolical
glamour which must inevitably attend a boy who has told a minister to
go to hell.




Chapter III



Until he reached the age of twelve, Georgie's education was a domestic
process; tutors came to the house; and those citizens who yearned for
his taking down often said: "Just wait till he has to go to public