been the homes of his boyhood playmates; old friends of his
grandfather had lived here;--in this alley he had fought with two boys
at the same time, and whipped them; in that front yard he had been
successfully teased into temporary insanity by a. Sunday-school class of
pinky little girls. On that sagging porch a laughing woman had fed
him and other boys with doughnuts and gingerbread; yonder he saw the
staggered relics of the iron picket fence he had made his white pony
jump, on a dare, and in the shabby, stone-faced house behind the fence
he had gone to children's parties, and, when he was a little older he
had danced there often, and fallen in love with Mary Sharon, and kissed
her, apparently by force, under the stairs in the hall. The double front
doors, of meaninglessly carved walnut, once so glossily varnished, had
been painted smoke gray, but the smoke grime showed repulsively, even on
the smoke gray; and over the doors a smoked sign proclaimed the place to
be a "Stag Hotel."

Other houses had become boarding-houses too genteel for signs, but many
were franker, some offering "board by the day, week or meal," and some,
more laconic, contenting themselves with the label: "Rooms." One,
having torn out part of an old stone-trimmed bay window for purposes of
commercial display, showed forth two suspended petticoats and a pair
of oyster-coloured flannel trousers to prove the claims of its
black-and-gilt sign: "French Cleaning and Dye House." Its next neighbour
also sported a remodelled front and permitted no doubt that its mission
in life was to attend cosily upon death: "J. M. Rolsener. Caskets.
The Funeral Home." And beyond that, a plain old honest four-square
gray-painted brick house was flamboyantly decorated with a great gilt
scroll on the railing of the old-fashioned veranda: "Mutual Benev't
Order Cavaliers and Dames of Purity." This was the old Minafer house.

George passed it without perceptibly wincing; in fact, he held his head
up, and except for his gravity of countenance and the prison pallor he
had acquired by too constantly remaining indoors, there was little to
warn an acquaintance that he was not precisely the same George Amberson
Minafer known aforetime. He was still so magnificent, indeed, that there
came to his ears a waft of comment from a passing automobile. This was a
fearsome red car, glittering in brass, with half-a-dozen young people
in it whose motorism had reached an extreme manifestation in