e, the
white evening tie he had been about to put on dangling from his hand,
which had fallen limply on the arm of the chair. The tie dropped to the
floor before he replied; and the hand that had held it was lifted to
stroke his graying hair reflectively. "By Jove!" he muttered. "That is
too bad!"

George folded his arms bitterly. "Will you kindly answer my question?
What have I done that wasn't honourable and right? Do you think these
riffraff can go about bandying my mother's name--"

"They can now," said Amberson. "I don't know if they could before, but
they certainly can now!"

"What do you mean by that?"

His uncle sighed profoundly, picked up his tie and, preoccupied with
despondency, twisted the strip of white lawn till it became unwearable.
Meanwhile, he tried to enlighten his nephew. "Gossip is never fatal,
Georgie," he said, "until it is denied. Gossip goes on about every
human being alive and about all the dead that are alive enough to be
remembered, and yet almost never does any harm until some defender makes
a controversy. Gossip's a nasty thing, but it's sickly, and if people
of good intentions will let it entirely alone, it will die, ninety-nine
times out of a hundred."

"See here," George said: "I didn't come to listen to any generalizing
dose of philosophy! I ask you--"

"You asked me what you've done, and I'm telling you." Amberson gave him
a melancholy smile, continuing: "Suffer me to do it in my own way. Fanny
says there's been talk about your mother, and that Mrs. Johnson does
some of it. I don't know, because naturally nobody would come to me with
such stuff or mention it before me; but it's presumably true--I suppose
it is. I've seen Fanny with Mrs. Johnson quite a lot; and that old lady
is a notorious gossip, and that's why she ordered you out of her house
when you pinned her down that she'd been gossiping. I have a suspicion
Mrs. Johnson has been quite a comfort to Fanny in their long talks; but
she'll probably quit speaking to her over this, because Fanny told you.
I suppose it's true that the 'whole town,' a lot of others, that is,
do share in the gossip. In this town, naturally, anything about any
Amberson has always been a stone dropped into the centre of a pond, and
a lie would send the ripples as far as a truth would. I've been on a
steamer when the story went all over the boat, the second day out,' that
the prettiest girl on board didn't have any ears; and you can take it
as a rul