it, finding a few painful steel engravings of placid,
chin-bearded faces, some of which he remembered dimly; but much more
numerous, and also more unfamiliar to him, were the pictures of
neat, aggressive men, with clipped short hair and clipped short
moustaches--almost all of them strangers to him. He delayed not long
with these, but turned to the index where the names of the five hundred
Most Prominent Citizens and Families in the History of the City were
arranged in alphabetical order, and ran his finger down the column of
A's:

Abbett Abbott Abrams Adam Adams Adler Akers Albertsmeyer Alexander
Allen Ambrose Ambuhl Anderson Andrews Appenbasch Archer Arszman Ashcraft
Austin Avey

George's eyes remained for some time fixed on the thin space between the
names "Allen" and "Ambrose." Then he closed the book quietly, and went
up to his own room, agreeing with the elevator boy, on the way, that it
was getting to be a mighty nasty wet and windy day outside.

The elevator boy noticed nothing unusual about him and neither did
Fanny, when she came in from church with her hat ruined, an hour later.
And yet something had happened--a thing which, years ago, had been the
eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the town. They had thought
of it, longed for it, hoping acutely that they might live to see the
day when it would come to pass. And now it had happened at last: Georgie
Minafer had got his come-upance.

He had got it three times filled and running over. The city had rolled
over his heart, burying it under, as it rolled over the Major's and
buried it under. The city had rolled over the Ambersons and buried them
under to the last vestige; and it mattered little that George guessed
easily enough that most of the five hundred Most Prominent had paid
something substantial "to defray the cost of steel engraving, etc."--the
Five Hundred had heaved the final shovelful of soot upon that heap
of obscurity wherein the Ambersons were lost forever from sight and
history. "Quicksilver in a nest of cracks!"

Georgie Minafer had got his come-upance, but the people who had so
longed for it were not there to see it, and they never knew it. Those
who were still living had forgotten all about it and all about him.

Chapter XXXIV

There was one border section of the city which George never explored in
his Sunday morning excursions. This was far out to the north where lay
the new Elysian Fields of the millionaires, though he