For that matter, he often heard well-dressed people speaking of him admiringly: a group of ladies once gathered about him on the pavement where he was spinning a top.

"I know this is Georgie!" one exclaimed, and turned to the others with the impressiveness of a showman.

"Major Amberson's only grandchild!" The others said, "It is ?" and made clicking sounds with their mouths; two of them loudly whispering, "So handsome!" Georgie, annoyed because they kept standing upon the circle he had chalked for his top, looked at them coldly and offered a suggestion: "Oh, go hire a hall!" As an Amberson, he was already a public character, and the story of his adventure in the Reverend Malloch Smith's front yard became a town topic.

Many people glanced at him with great distaste, thereafter, when they chanced to encounter him, which meant nothing to Georgie, because he innocently believed most grown people to be necessarily cross-looking as a normal phenomenon resulting from the adult state; and he failed to comprehend that the distasteful glances had any personal bearing upon himself.

If he had perceived such a bearing, he would have been affected only so far, probably, as to mutter, "Riffraff!" Possibly he would have shouted it; and, certainly, most people believed a story that went round the town just after Mrs.Amberson's funeral, when Georgie was eleven.
Georgie was reported to have differed with the undertaker about the seating of the family; his indignant voice had become audible: "Well, who is the most important person at my own grandmother's funeral ?" And later he had projected his head from the window of the foremost mourners' carriage, as the undertaker happened to pass.
"Riffraff!" There were people--grown people they were--who expressed themselves longingly: they did hope to live to see the day, they said, when that boy would get his come-upance! (They used that honest word, so much better than "deserts," and not until many years later to be more clumsily rendered as "what is coming to him.") Something was bound to take him down, some day, and they only wanted to be there! But Georgie heard nothing of this, and the yearners for his taking down went unsatisfied, while their yearning grew the greater as the happy day of fulfilment was longer and longer postponed.