were gathered there; they had
heard of his adventure, knew of the note, and were waiting to see what
was going to "happen" to him. They hoped for an account of things, and
also that he would allow them to "take turns" riding his pony to the end
of the alley and back.

They were really his henchmen: Georgie was a lord among boys. In 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 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 unt