ren got to? We must take
Lucy pretty soon, so that George can go and sit with the Class. We must
catch up with them."

She took her brother's arm, and the three moved on, looking about them
in the crowd.

"Curious," Amberson remarked, as they did not immediately discover the
young people they sought. "Even in such a concourse one would think we
couldn't fail to see the proprietor."

"Several hundred proprietors today," Eugene suggested.

"No; they're only proprietors of the university," said George's uncle.
"We're looking for the proprietor of the universe."

"There he is!" cried Isabel fondly, not minding this satire at all. "And
doesn't he look it!"

Her escorts were still laughing at her when they joined the proprietor
of the universe and his pretty friend, and though both Amberson and
Eugene declined to explain the cause of their mirth, even upon Lucy's
urgent request, the portents of the day were amiable, and the five made
a happy party--that is to say, four of them made a happy audience for
the fifth, and the mood of this fifth was gracious and cheerful.

George took no conspicuous part in either the academic or the social
celebrations of his class; he seemed to regard both sets of exercises
with a tolerant amusement, his own "crowd" "not going in much for either
of those sorts of things," as he explained to Lucy. What his crowd had
gone in for remained ambiguous; some negligent testimony indicating
that, except for an astonishing reliability which they all seemed to
have attained in matters relating to musical comedy, they had not gone
in for anything. Certainly the question one of them put to Lucy, in
response to investigations of hers, seemed to point that way: "Don't you
think," he said, "really, don't you think that being things is rather
better than doing things?"

He said "rahthuh bettuh" for "rather better," and seemed to do it
deliberately, with perfect knowledge of what he was doing. Later, Lucy
mocked him to George, and George refused to smile: he somewhat inclined
to such pronunciations, himself. This inclination was one of the things
that he had acquired in the four years.

What else he had acquired, it might have puzzled him to state, had
anybody asked him and required a direct reply within a reasonable space
of time. He had learned how to pass examinations by "cramming"; that is,
in three or four days and nights he could get into his head enough of
a selected fragment of some scientific o