eighbour; and Amberson laughed
wistfully as they turned in between the stone and brick gate pillars,
and rolled up the crushed stone driveway. "I wonder, Lucy, if history's
going on forever repeating itself," he said. "I wonder if this town's
going on building up things and rolling over them, as poor father once
said it was rolling over his poor old heart. It looks like it: here's
the Amberson Mansion again, only it's Georgian instead of nondescript
Romanesque; but it's just the same Amberson Mansion that my father built
long before you were born. The only difference is that it's your father
who's built this one now. It's all the same, in the long run."

Lucy did not quite understand, but she laughed as a friend should, and,
taking his arm, showed him through vast rooms where ivory-panelled walls
and trim window hangings were reflected dimly in dark, rugless floors,
and the sparse furniture showed that Lucy had been "collecting" with a
long purse. "By Jove!" he said. "You have been going it! Fanny tells me
you had a great 'house-warming' dance, and you keep right on being the
belle of the ball, not any softer-hearted than you used to be. Fred
Kinney's father says you've refused Fred so often that he got engaged to
Janie Sharon just to prove that someone would have him in spite of his
hair. Well, the material world do move, and you've got the new kind
of house it moves into nowadays--if it has the new price! And even the
grand old expanses of plate glass we used to be so proud of at the other
Amberson Mansion--they've gone, too, with the crowded heavy gold and red
stuff. Curious! We've still got the plate glass windows, though all we
can see out of 'em is the smoke and the old Johnson house, which is a
counter-jumper's boardinghouse now, while you've got a view, and you cut
it all up into little panes. Well, you're pretty refreshingly out of the
smoke up here."

"Yes, for a while," Lucy laughed. "Until it comes and we have to move
out farther."

"No, you'll stay here," he assured her. "It will be somebody else who'll
move out farther."

He continued to talk of the house after Eugene arrived, and gave them no
account of his journey until they had retired from the dinner table
to Eugene's library, a gray and shadowy room, where their coffee
was brought. Then, equipped with a cigar, which seemed to occupy his
attention, Amberson spoke in a casual tone of his sister and her son.

"I found Isabel as well as usual," he sa