“Don't tell me what you intend, please,” Mrs. Johnson interrupted crisply. “And I should prefer that you would not make your voice quite so loud in this house, which I happen to own. Your aunt may have told you—though I think it would have been very unwise in her if she did, and not very considerate of me—she may have told you that we discussed some such topic as I have mentioned, and possibly that would have been true. If I talked it over with her, you may be sure I spoke in the most charitable spirit, and without sharing in other people's disposition to put an evil interpretation on what may be nothing more than unfortunate appearances and—”
“My God!” said George. “I can't stand this!”
“You have the option of dropping the subject,” Mrs. Johnson suggested tartly, and she added: “Or of leaving the house.”
“I'll do that soon enough, but first I mean to know—”
“I am perfectly willing to tell you anything you wish if you will remember to ask it quietly. I'll also take the liberty of reminding you that I had a perfect right to discuss the subject with your aunt. Other people may be less considerate in not confining their discussion of it, as I have, to charitable views expressed only to a member of the family. Other people—”
“Other people!” the unhappy George repeated viciously. “That's what I want to know about—these other people!”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I want to ask you about them. You say you know of other people who talk about this.”
“I presume they do.”
“How many?”
“What?”
“I want to know how many other people talk about it?”
“Dear, dear!” she protested. “How should I know that?”
“Haven't you heard anybody mention it?”
“I presume so.”
“Well, how many have you heard?”
Mrs. Johnson was becoming more annoyed than apprehensive, and she showed it. “Really, this isn't a court-room,” she said. “And I'm not a defendant in a libel-suit, either!”
The unfortunate young man lost what remained of his balance. “You may be!” he cried. “I intend to know just who's dared to say these things, if I have to force my way into every house in town, and I'm going to make them take every word of it back! I mean to know the name of every slanderer that's spoken of this matter to you and of every tattler you've passed it on to yourself. I mean to know—”
“You'll know something pretty quick!” she said, rising with difficulty; and her voice was thick with the sense of insult. “You'll know that you're out in the street. Please to leave my house!”
George stiffened sharply. Then he bowed, and strode out of the door.
Three minutes later, disheveled and perspiring, but cold all over, he burst into his Uncle George's room at the Major's without knocking. Amberson was dressing.
“Good gracious, Georgie!” he exclaimed. “What's up?”
“I've just come from Mrs. Johnson's—across the street,” George panted.
“You have your own tastes!” was Amberson's comment. “But curious as they are, you ought to do something better with your hair, and button your waistcoat to the right buttons—even for Mrs. Johnson! What were you doing over there?”
“She told me to leave the house,” George said desperately. “I went there because Aunt Fanny told me the whole town was talking about my mother and that man Morgan—that they say my mother is going to marry him and that proves she was too fond of him before my father died—she said this Mrs. Johnson was one that talked about it, and I went to her to ask who were the others.”
Amberson's jaw fell in dismay. “Don't tell me you did that!” he said, in a low voice; and then, seeing that it was true, “Oh, now you have done it!”
Chapter XXIII
“I've 'done it'?” George cried. “What do you mean: I've done it? And what have I done?”
Amberson had collapsed into an easy chair beside his dressing-table, 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 rule that when a woman's past thirty-five the prettier her hair is, the more certain you are to meet somebody with reliable information that it's a wig. You can be sure that for many years there's been more gossip in this place about the Ambersons than about any other family. I dare say it isn't so much so now as it used to be, because the town got too big long ago, but it's the truth that the more prominent you are the more gossip there is about you, and the more people would like to pull you down. Well, they can't do it as long as you refuse to know what gossip there is about you. But the minute you notice it, it's got you! I'm not speaking of certain kinds of slander that sometimes people have got to take to the courts; I'm talking of the wretched buzzing the Mrs. Johnsons do—the thing you seem to have such a horror of—people 'talking'—the kind of thing that has assailed your mother. People who have repeated a slander either get ashamed or forget it, if they're let alone. Challenge them, and in self-defense they believe everything they've said: they'd rather believe you a sinner than believe themselves liars, naturally. Submit to gossip and you kill it; fight it and you make it strong. People will forget almost any slander except one that's been fought.”
“Is that all?” George asked.
“I suppose so,” his