and shabbier--for all these shabby
houses, burning soft coal, did their best to help in the destruction of
their own value. They helped to make the quarter so dingy and the air so
foul to breathe that no one would live there who had money enough to get
"farther out" where there were glimpses of ungrayed sky and breaths of
cleaner winds. And with the coming of the new speed, "farther out" was
now as close to business as the Addition had been in the days of its
prosperity. Distances had ceased to matter.

The five new houses, built so closely where had been the fine lawn of
the Amberson Mansion, did not look new. When they were a year old they
looked as old as they would ever look; and two of them were vacant,
having never been rented, for the Major's mistake about apartment houses
had been a disastrous one. "He guessed wrong," George Amberson said..
"He guessed wrong at just the wrong time! Housekeeping in a house is
harder than in an apartment; and where the smoke and dirt are as thick
as they are in the Addition, women can't stand it. People were crazy for
apartments--too bad he couldn't have seen it in time. Poor man! he
digs away at his ledgers by his old gas drop-light lamp almost every
night--he still refuses to let the Mansion be torn up for wiring, you
know. But he had one painful satisfaction this spring: he got his taxes
lowered!"

Amberson laughed ruefully, and Fanny Minafer asked how the Major could
have managed such an economy. They were sitting upon the veranda at
Isabel's one evening during the third summer of the absence of their
nephew and his mother; and the conversation had turned toward Amberson
finances.

"I said it was a 'painful satisfaction,' Fanny," he explained. "The
property has gone down in value, and they assessed it lower than they
did fifteen years ago."

"But farther out--"

"Oh, yes, 'farther out!' Prices are magnificent 'farther out,' and
farther in, too! We just happen to be the wrong spot, that's all. Not
that I don't think something could be done if father would let me have
a hand; but he won't. He can't, I suppose I ought to say. He's 'always
done his own figuring,' he says; and it's his lifelong habit to keep his
affairs: and even his books, to himself, and just hand us out the money.
Heaven knows he's done enough of that!"

He sighed; and both were silent, looking out at the long flares of the
constantly passing automobile headlights, shifting in vast geometric
demonstratio