all about it. I wouldn't have--"

But he had opened the door with his free hand. "Never mind!" he said,
and she was obliged to pass out into the hall, the door closing quickly
behind her.

Chapter XXII

George took off his dressing-gown and put on a collar and a tie, his
fingers shaking so that the tie was not his usual success; then he
picked up his coat and waistcoat, and left the room while still in
process of donning them, fastening the buttons, as he ran down the front
stairs to the door. It was not until he reached the middle of the street
that he realized that he had forgotten his hat; and he paused for an
irresolute moment, during which his eye wandered, for no reason, to the
Fountain of Neptune. This castiron replica of too elaborate sculpture
stood at the next corner, where the Major had placed it when the
Addition was laid out so long ago. The street corners had been shaped to
conform with the great octagonal basin, which was no great inconvenience
for horse-drawn vehicles, but a nuisance to speeding automobiles; and,
even as George looked, one of the latter, coming too fast, saved itself
only by a dangerous skid as it rounded the fountain. This skid was to
George's liking, though he would have been more pleased to see the car
go over, for he was wishing grief and destruction, just then, upon all
the automobiles in the world.

His eyes rested a second or two longer upon the Fountain of Neptune, not
an enlivening sight even in the shielding haze of autumn twilight. For
more than a year no water had run in the fountain: the connections had
been broken, and the Major was evasive about restorations, even when
reminded by his grandson that a dry fountain is as gay as a dry fish.
Soot streaks and a thousand pits gave Neptune the distinction, at least,
of leprosy, which the mermaids associated with him had been consistent
in catching; and his trident had been so deeply affected as to drop its
prongs. Altogether, this heavy work of heavy art, smoked dry, hugely
scabbed, cracked, and crumbling, was a dismal sight to the distracted
eye of George Amberson Minafer, and its present condition of craziness
may have added a mite to his own. His own was sufficient, with no
additions, however, as he stood looking at the Johnsons' house and
those houses on both sides of it--that row of riffraff dwellings he had
thought so damnable, the day when he stood in his grandfather's yard,
staring at them, after hearing what