he made that wild appeal, Isabel was doomed to
answer him with the wistful, faint murmur:

"I'd like to have-seen him. Just--just once."

A cheerful darkey went by the house, loudly and tunelessly whistling
some broken thoughts upon women, fried food and gin; then a group of
high school boys, returning homeward after important initiations, were
heard skylarking along the sidewalk, rattling sticks on the fences,
squawking hoarsely, and even attempting to sing in the shocking new
voices of uncompleted adolescence. For no reason, and just as a poultry
yard falls into causeless agitation, they stopped in front of the house,
and for half an hour produced the effect of a noisy multitude in full
riot.

To the woman standing upstairs in the hall, this was almost unbearable;
and she felt that she would have to go down and call to them to stop;
but she was too timid, and after a time went back to her room, and sat
at her desk again. She left the door open, and frequently glanced out
into the hall, but gradually became once more absorbed in the figures
which represented her prospective income from her great plunge in
electric lights for automobiles. She did not hear George return to his
own room.

A superstitious person might have thought it unfortunate that her
partner in this speculative industry (as in Wilbur's disastrous
rolling-mills) was that charming but too haphazardous man of the world,
George Amberson. He was one of those optimists who believe that if you
put money into a great many enterprises one of them is sure to turn out
a fortune, and therefore, in order to find the lucky one, it is only
necessary to go into a large enough number of them. Altogether gallant
in spirit, and beautifully game under catastrophe, he had gone into a
great many, and the unanimity of their "bad luck," as he called it,
gave him one claim to be a distinguished person, if he had no other.
In business he was ill fated with a consistency which made him, in that
alone, a remarkable man; and he declared, with some earnestness, that
there was no accounting for it except by the fact that there had been
so much good luck in his family before he was born that something had to
balance it.

"You ought to have thought of my record and stayed out," he told Fanny,
one day the next spring, when the affairs of the headlight company had
begun to look discouraging. "I feel the old familiar sinking that's
attended all my previous efforts to prove myself a