. "An apartment house! Oh,
my Lord!"

"Don't worry! Your grandfather wouldn't listen to me, but he'll wish
he had, some day. He says that people aren't going to live in miserable
little flats when they can get a whole house with some grass in front
and plenty of backyard behind. He sticks it out that apartment houses
will never do in a town of this type, and when I pointed out to him
that a dozen or so of 'em already are doing, he claimed it was just the
novelty, and that they'd all be empty as soon as people got used to 'em.
So he's putting up these houses."

"Is he getting miserly in his old age?"

"Hardly! Look what he gave Sydney and Amelia!"

"I don't mean he's a miser, of course," said George. "Heaven knows
he's liberal enough with mother and me; but why on earth didn't he sell
something or other rather than do a thing like this?"

"As a matter of fact," Amberson returned coolly, "I believe he has sold
something or other, from time to time."

"Well, in heaven's name," George cried, "what did he do it for?"

"To get money," his uncle mildly replied. "That's my deduction."

"I suppose you're joking--or trying to!"

"That's the best way to look at it," Amberson said amiably. "Take the
whole thing as a joke--and in the meantime, if you haven't had your
breakfast--"

"I haven't!"

"Then if I were you I'd go in and gets some. And"--he paused, becoming
serious--"and if I were you I wouldn't say anything to your grandfather
about this."

"I don't think I could trust myself to speak to him about it," said
George. "I want to treat him respectfully, because he is my grandfather,
but I don't believe I could if I talked to him about such a thing as
this!"

And with a gesture of despair, plainly signifying that all too soon
after leaving bright college years behind him he had entered into the
full tragedy of life, George turned bitterly upon his heel and went into
the house for his breakfast.

His uncle, with his head whimsically upon one side, gazed after him not
altogether unsympathetically, then descended again into the excavation
whence he had lately emerged. Being a philosopher he was not surprised,
that afternoon, in the course of a drive he took in the old carriage
with the Major, when, George was encountered upon the highway, flashing
along in his runabout with Lucy beside him and Pendennis doing better
than three minutes.

"He seems to have recovered," Amberson remarked: "Looks in the highest
good