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.
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