The Pupil ..............................................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of terms, to

speak of money to a person who spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he was

unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without some more conventional glance in that

direction than he could find an opening for in the manner of the large affable lady who sat there drawing a

pair of soiled gants de Suede through a fat jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding, repeated over and

over everything but the thing he would have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear the figure of his

salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that note the little boy came back the little boy Mrs.

Moreen had sent out of the room to fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only with the casual

observation that he couldn't find it. As he dropped this cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the

candidate for the honour of taking his education in hand. This personage reflected somewhat grimly that the

thing he should have to teach his little charge would be to appear to address himself to his mother when he

When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of their companion Pemberton supposed it

was precisely to approach the delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to say some things

about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn't catch. They were extravagantly to his advantage

save when she lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, "And all overclouded by THIS, you

know; all at the mercy of a weakness !" Pemberton gathered that the weakness was in the region of the

heart. He had known the poor child was not robust: this was the basis on which he had been invited to treat,

through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then at Nice, who happened to know both his needs and

those of the amiable American family looking out for something really superior in the way of a resident tutor.

The young man's impression of his prospective pupil, who had come into the room as if to see for himself the

moment Pemberton was admitted, was not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for granted. Morgan

Moreen was somehow sickly without being "delicate," and that he looked intelligent it is true Pemberton

wouldn't have enjoyed his being stupid only added to the suggestion that, as with his big mouth and big

ears he really couldn't be called pretty, he might too utterly fail to please. Pemberton was modest, was even

timid; and the chance that his small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had quite figured, to his

anxiety, among the dangers of an untried experiment. He reflected, however, that these were risks one had to

run when one accepted a position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one's university honours

had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren. At any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it

was understood he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now, he succeeded, in

spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment. It was not the fault of

the conscious smile which seemed a reference to the lady's expensive identity, it was not the fault of this

demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if the allusion didn't sound rather vulgar. This

was exactly because she became still more gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you that all that will be quite

Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that" was to amount to people had such

different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's words, however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to

elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh lala!"

Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the window with his back turned, his

hands in his pockets and the air in his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play. The young man wondered if

he should be able to teach him to play, though his mother had said it would never do and that this was why

school was impossible. Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly: "Mr. Moreen

will be delighted to meet your wishes. As I told you, he has been called to London for a week. As soon as he

This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply, laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I

"They'll give you anything you like," the boy remarked unexpectedly, returning from the window. "We don't

"My darling, you're too quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out to caress him a practised but ineffectual

hand. He slipped out of it, but looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already had time

to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric face seemed to change its time of life. At this

moment it was infantine, yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and knowledges.

Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his

teens. Nevertheless he divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn't prove a bore. He would prove on the

contrary a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in spite of a certain repulsion.

"You pompous little person! We're not extravagant!" Mrs. Moreen gaily protested, making another

unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy to her side. "You must know what to expect," she went on to

"The less you expect the better!" her companion interposed. "But we ARE people of fashion."

"Only so far as YOU make us so!" Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked. "Well then, on Friday don't tell me

you're superstitious and mind you don't fail us. Then you'll see us all. I'm so sorry the girls are out. I guess

you'll like the girls. And, you know, I've another son, quite different from this one."

"You're very witty," Pemberton remarked to the child a proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm,

The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he

"Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?" Pemberton replied. Yet he didn't want to

come at all; he was coming because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune at the end

of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He

had had his full wave but couldn't pay the score at his inn. Moreover he had caught in the boy's eyes the

"Well, I'll do the best I can for you," said Morgan; with which he turned away again. He passed out of one of

the long windows; Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He remained there while the

young man took leave of his mother, who, on Pemberton's looking as if he expected a farewell from him,

interposed with: "Leave him, leave him; he's so strange!" Pemberton supposed her to fear something he might

say. "He's a genius you'll love him," she added. "He's much the most interesting person in the family." And

before he could invent some civility to oppose to this she wound up with: "But we're all good, you know!"

"He's a genius you'll love him!" were words that recurred to our aspirant before the Friday, suggesting

among many things that geniuses were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there was an

element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken too much for granted it would only

disgust him. As he left the villa after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child leaning over

Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: "By the time you come back I shall have thought of

On the Friday he saw them all, as Mrs. Moreen had promised, for her husband had come back and the girls

and the other son were at home. Mr. Moreen had a white moustache, a confiding manner and, in his

buttonhole, the ribbon of a foreign order bestowed, as Pemberton eventually learned, for services. For what

services he never clearly ascertained: this was a point one of a large number that Mr. Moreen's manner

never confided. What it emphatically did confide was that he was even more a man of the world than you

might first make out. Ulick, the firstborn, was in visible training for the same profession under the

disadvantage as yet, however, of a buttonhole but feebly floral and a moustache with no pretensions to type.

The girls had hair and figures and manners and small fat feet, but had never been out alone. As for Mrs.

Moreen Pemberton saw on a nearer view that her elegance was intermittent and her parts didn't always match.

Her husband, as she had promised, met with enthusiasm Pemberton's ideas in regard to a salary. The young

man had endeavoured to keep these stammerings modest, and Mr. Moreen made it no secret that HE found

them wanting in "style." He further mentioned that he aspired to be intimate with his children, to be their best

friend, and that he was always looking out for them. That was what he went off for, to London and other

places to look out; and this vigilance was the theory of life, as well as the real occupation, of the whole

family. They all looked out, for they were very frank on the subject of its being necessary. They desired it to

be understood that they were earnest people, and also that their fortune, though quite adequate for earnest

people, required the most careful administration. Mr. Moreen, as the parent bird, sought sustenance for the

nest. Ulick invoked support mainly at the club, where Pemberton guessed that it was usually served on green

cloth. The girls used to do up their hair and their frocks themselves, and our young man felt appealed to to be

glad, in regard to Morgan's education, that, though it must naturally be of the best, it didn't cost too much.

After a little he WAS glad, forgetting at times his own needs in the interest inspired by the child's character

During the first weeks of their acquaintance Morgan had been as puzzling as a page in an unknown language

altogether different from the obvious little AngloSaxons who had misrepresented childhood to Pemberton.

Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in

translation. Today, after a considerable interval, there is something phantasmagoria, like a prismatic

reflexion or a serial novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens. If it were not for a few

tangible tokens a lock of Morgan's hair cut by his own hand, and the halfdozen letters received from him

when they were disjoined the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for

anything but dreamland. Their supreme quaintness was their success as it appeared to him for a while at the

time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure. Wasn't it success to have kept him

so hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came

it was enough to MAKE one superstitious so that he utterly committed himself, and this not by calculation

or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together?

They amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was still young and had not seen

much of the world his English years had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the

Moreens for they had THEIR desperate proprieties struck him as topsyturvy. He had encountered

nothing like them at Oxford; still less had any such note been struck to his younger American ear during the

four years at Yale in which he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain. The

reaction of the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further. He had thought himself very sharp that first

day in hitting them all off in his mind with the "cosmopolite" label. Later it seemed feeble and colourless

He yet when he first applied it felt a glow of joy for an instructor he was still empirical rise from the

apprehension that living with them would really he to see life. Their sociable strangeness was an intimation

of that their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good humour, their infinite dawdling (they were always

getting themselves up, but it took forever, and Pemberton had once found Mr. Moreen shaving in the

drawingroom), their French, their Italian and, cropping up in the foreign fluencies, their cold tough slices of

American. They lived on macaroni and coffee they had these articles prepared in perfection but they

knew recipes for a hundred other dishes. They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and

catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities. They talked of

"good places" as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players. They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a

piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties. They were a perfect calendar of the "days" of their

friends, which Pemberton knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out of bed to go to, and which made

the week larger than life when Mrs. Moreen talked of them with Paula and Amy. Their initiations gave their

new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. Mrs. Moreen had translated something at some former

period an author whom it made Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of. They could imitate Venetian

and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular communicated with each other

in an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some patois of

one of their countries, but which he "caught on to" as he would not have grasped provincial development of

"It's the family language Ultramoreen," Morgan explained to him drolly enough; but the boy rarely

condescended to use it himself, though he dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little prelate.

Among all the "days" with which Mrs. Moreen's memory was taxed she managed to squeeze in one of her

own, which her friends sometimes forgot. But the house drew a frequented air from the number of fine people

who were freely named there and from several mysterious men with foreign titles and English clothes whom

Morgan called the princes and who, on sofas with the girls, talked French very loud though sometimes with

some oddity of accent as if to show they were saying nothing improper. Pemberton wondered how the

princes could ever propose in that tone and so publicly: he took for granted cynically that this was what was

desired of them. Then he recognised that even for the chance of such an advantage Mrs. Moreen would never

allow Paula and Amy to receive alone. These young ladies were not at all timid, but it was just the safeguards

that made them so candidly free. It was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted tremendously to be Philistines.

In one respect, however, certainly they achieved no rigour they were wonderfully amiable and ecstatic

about Morgan. It was a genuine tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each. They even praised

his beauty, which was small, and were as afraid of him as if they felt him of finer clay. They spoke of him as

a little angel and a prodigy they touched on his want of health with long vague faces. Pemberton feared at

first an extravagance that might make him hate the boy, but before this happened he had become extravagant

himself. Later, when he had grown rather to hate the others, it was a bribe to patience for him that they were

at any rate nice about Morgan, going on tiptoe if they fancied he was showing symptoms, and even giving up

somebody's "day" to procure him a pleasure. Mixed with this too was the oddest wish to make him

independent, as if they had felt themselves not good enough for him. They passed him over to the new

members of their circle very much as if wishing to force some charity of adoption on so free an agent and get

rid of their own charge. They were delighted when they saw Morgan take so to his kind playfellow, and could

think of no higher praise for the young man. It was strange how they contrived to reconcile the appearance,

and indeed the essential fact, of adoring the child with their eagerness to wash their hands of him. Did they

want to get rid of him before he should find them out? Pemberton was finding them out month by month. The

boy's fond family, however this might be, turned their backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the

reproach of interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them it was by THEM he first

observed it; they proclaimed it with complete humility his companion was moved to speculate on the

mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his detachment from most of the things they

represented had come from was more than an observer could say it certainly had burrowed under two or

As for Pemberton's own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before he got the point of view, so little

had he been prepared for it by the smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto

revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy and surprising, deficient in many properties

supposed common to the genus and abounding in others that were the portion only of the supernaturally

clever. One day his friend made a great stride: it cleared up the question to perceive that Morgan WAS

supernaturally clever and that, though the formula was temporarily meagre, this would be the only

assumption on which one could successfully deal with him. He had the general quality of a child for whom

life had not been simplified by school, a kind of homebred sensibility which might have been as bad for

himself but was charming for others, and a whole range of refinement and perception little musical

vibrations as taking as pickedup airs begotten by wandering about Europe at the tail of his migratory tribe.

This might not have been an education to recommend in advance, but its results with so special a subject

were as appreciable as the marks on a piece of fine porcelain. There was at the same time in him a small

strain of stoicism, doubtless the fruit of having had to begin early to bear pain, which counted for pluck and

made it of less consequence that he might have been thought at school rather a polyglot little beast.

Pemberton indeed quickly found himself rejoicing that school was out of the question: in any million of boys

it was probably good for all but one, and Morgan was that millionth. It would have made him comparative

and superior it might have made him really require kicking. Pemberton would try to be school himself a

bigger seminary than five hundred grazing donkeys, so that, winning no prizes, the boy would remain

unconscious and irresponsible and amusing amusing, because, though life was already intense in his

childish nature, freshness still made there a strong draught for jokes. It turned out that even in the still air of

Morgan's various disabilities jokes flourished greatly. He was a pale lean acute undeveloped little

cosmopolite, who liked intellectual gymnastics and who also, as regards the behaviour of mankind, had

noticed more things than you might suppose, but who nevertheless had his proper playroom of superstitions,

At Nice once, toward evening, as the pair rested in the open air after a walk, and looked over the sea at the

pink western lights, he said suddenly to his comrade: "Do you like it, you know being with us all in this

"Well, I know I'm supposed to instruct you in virtue; but in that case don't do right."

They were silent a minute; after which the boy asked: "Do you like my father and my mother very much?"

Morgan received this with another silence; then unexpectedly, familiarly, but at the same time affectionately,

For a particular reason the words made our young man change colour. The boy noticed in an instant that he

had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself and pupil and master exchanged a longish glance in which

there was a consciousness of many more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation.

It produced for Pemberton an embarrassment; it raised in a shadowy form a question this was the first

glimpse of it destined to play a singular and, as he imagined, owing to the altogether peculiar conditions, an

unprecedented part in his intercourse with his little companion. Later, when he found himself talking with the

youngster in a way in which few youngsters could ever have been talked with, he thought of that clumsy

moment on the bench at Nice as the dawn of an understanding that had broadened. What had added to the

clumsiness then was that he thought it his duty to declare to Morgan that he might abuse him, Pemberton, as

much as he liked, but must never abuse his parents. To this Morgan had the easy retort that he hadn't dreamed

"Then why am I a humbug for saying I think them charming?" the young man asked, conscious of a certain

"They love you better than anything in the world never forget that," said Pemberton.

"You ARE a humbug!" laughed Morgan, passing an arm into his tutor's. He leaned against him looking oft at

"Don't kick my shins," said Pemberton while he reflected "Hang it, I can't complain of them to the child!"

He did understand fully before long, but he made a fight even with himself before he confessed it. He thought

it the oddest thing to have a struggle with the child about. He wondered he didn't hate the hope of the

Moreens for bringing the struggle on. But by the time it began any such sentiment for that scion was closed to

him. Morgan was a special case, and to know him was to accept him on his own odd terms. Pemberton had

spent his aversion to special cases before arriving at knowledge. When at last he did arrive his quandary was

great. Against every interest he had attached himself. They would have to meet things together. Before they

A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly gave up the villa at Nice.

Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little

tours one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to

Florence and then, at the end of ten days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back in

mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice "for ever," as they said; but this didn't prevent their

squeezing, one rainy muggy May night, into a secondclass railwaycarriage you could never tell by which

class they would travel where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful collection of bundles and

bags. The explanation of this manoeuvre was that they had determined to spend the summer "in some bracing

place"; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment a fourth floor in a thirdrate avenue,

where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful and passed the next four months in

The better part of this baffled sojourn was for the preceptor and his pupil, who, visiting the Invalides and

Notre Dame, the Conciergerie and all the museums, took a hundred remunerative rambles. They learned to

know their Paris, which was useful, for they came back another year for a longer stay, the general character

of which in Pemberton's memory today mixes pitiably and confusedly with that of the first. He sees

Morgan's shabby knickerbockers the everlasting pair that didn't match his blouse and that as he grew longer

could only grow faded. He remembers the particular holes in his three or four pair of coloured stockings.

Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was absolutely necessary partly, no

doubt, by his own fault, for he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher. "My dear

fellow, you ARE coming to pieces," Pemberton would say to him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the

child would reply, looking at him serenely up and down: "My dear fellow, so are you! I don't want to cast you

in the shade." Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this the assertion so closely represented the fact. If

however the deficiencies of his own wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn't like his little charge to

look too poor. Later he used to say "Well, if we're poor, why, after all, shouldn't we look it?" and he consoled

himself with thinking there was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan's disrepair it differed

from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and spoils his things. He could trace perfectly the degrees by

which, in proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs. Moreen shrewdly forbore

to renew his garments. She did nothing that didn't show, neglected him because he escaped notice, and then,

as he illustrated this clever policy, discouraged at home his public appearances. Her position was logical

During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of how he and his comrade might strike

people; wandering languidly through the Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go, sitting on the winter

days in the galleries of the Louvre, so splendidly ironical to the homeless, as if for the advantage of the

calorifere. They joked about it sometimes: it was the sort of joke that was perfectly within the boy's compass.

They figured themselves as part of the vast vague handtomouth multitude of the enormous city and

pretended they were proud of their position in it it showed them "such a lot of life" and made them

conscious of a democratic brotherhood. If Pemberton couldn't feel a sympathy in destitution with his small

companion for after all Morgan's fond parents would never have let him really suffer the boy would at

least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing. He used sometimes to wonder what people would think

they were to fancy they were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping. Morgan

wouldn't be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor he wasn't smart enough; though he might pass for

his companion's sickly little brother. Now and then he had a five franc piece, and except once, when they

bought a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they laid it out scientifically in

old books. This was sure to be a great day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that

garnish the parapets. Such occasions helped them to live, for their books ran low very soon after the

beginning of their acquaintance. Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a

If they had to relinquish that summer the advantage of the bracing climate the young man couldn't but suspect

this failure of the cup when at their very lips to have been the effect of a rude jostle of his own. This had

represented his first blowout, as he called it, with his patrons; his first successful attempt though there was

little other success about it to bring them to a consideration of his impossible position. As the ostensible eve

of a costly journey the moment had struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the presentation of an

ultimatum. Ridiculous as it sounded, he had never yet been able to compass an uninterrupted private

interview with the elder pair or with either of them singly. They were always flanked by their elder children,

and poor Pemberton usually had his own little charge at his side. He was conscious of its being a house in

which the surface of one's delicacy got rather smudged; nevertheless he had preserved the bloom of his

scruple against announcing to Mr. and Mrs. Moreen with publicity that he shouldn't be able to go on longer

without a little money. He was still simple enough to suppose Ulick and Paula and Amy might not know that

since his arrival he had only had a hundred and forty francs; and he was magnanimous enough to wish not to

compromise their parents in their eyes. Mr. Moreen now listened to him, as he listened to every one and to

every thing, like a man of the world, and seemed to appeal to him though not of course too grossly to try

and be a little more of one himself. Pemberton recognised in fact the importance of the character from the

advantage it gave Mr. Moreen. He was not even confused or embarrassed, whereas the young man in his

service was more so than there was any reason for. Neither was he surprised at least any more than a

gentleman had to be who freely confessed himself a little shocked though not perhaps strictly at Pemberton.

"We must go into this, mustn't we, dear?" he said to his wife. He assured his young friend that the matter

should have his very best attention; and he melted into space as elusively as if, at the door, he were taking an

inevitable but deprecatory precedence. When, the next moment, Pemberton found himself alone with Mrs.

Moreen it was to hear her say "I see, I see" stroking the roundness of her chin and looking as if she were

only hesitating between a dozen easy remedies. If they didn't make their push Mr. Moreen could at least

disappear for several days. During his absence his wife took up the subject again spontaneously, but her

contribution to it was merely that she had thought all the while they were getting on so beautifully.

Pemberton's reply to this revelation was that unless they immediately put down something on account he

would leave them on the spot and for ever. He knew she would wonder how he would get away, and for a

moment expected her to enquire. She didn't, for which he was almost grateful to her, so little was he in a

"You won't, you KNOW you won't you're too interested," she said. "You are interested, you know you are,

you dear kind man!" She laughed with almost condemnatory archness, as if it were a reproach though she

Pemberton's mind was fully made up to take his step the following week. This would give him time to get an

answer to a letter he had despatched to England. If he did in the event nothing of the sort that is if he stayed

another year and then went away only for three months it was not merely because before the answer to his

letter came (most unsatisfactory when it did arrive) Mr. Moreen generously counted out to him, and again

with the sacrifice to "form" of a marked man of the world, three hundred francs in elegant ringing gold. He

was irritated to find that Mrs. Moreen was right, that he couldn't at the pinch bear to leave the child. This

stood out clearer for the very reason that, the night of his desperate appeal to his patrons, he had seen fully for

the first time where he was. Wasn't it another proof of the success with which those patrons practised their

arts that they had managed to avert for so long the illuminating flash? It descended on our friend with a

breadth of effect which perhaps would have struck a spectator as comical, after he had returned to his little

servile room, which looked into a close court where a bare dirty opposite wall took, with the sound of shrill

clatter, the reflexion of lighted back windows. He had simply given himself away to a band of adventurers.

The idea, the word itself, wore a romantic horror for him he had always lived on such safe lines. Later it

assumed a more interesting, almost a soothing, sense: it pointed a moral, and Pemberton could enjoy a moral.

The Moreens were adventurers not merely because they didn't pay their debts, because they lived on society,

but because their whole view of life, dim and confused and instinctive, like that of clever colourblind

animals, was speculative and rapacious and mean. Oh they were "respectable," and that only made them more

immondes. The young man's analysis, while he brooded, put it at last very simply they were adventurers

because they were toadies and snobs. That was the completest account of them it was the law of their being.

Even when this truth became vivid to their ingenious inmate he remained unconscious of how much his mind

had been prepared for it by the extraordinary little boy who had now become such a complication in his life.

Much less could he then calculate on the information he was still to owe the extraordinary little boy.

But it was during the ensuing time that the real problem came up the problem of how far it was excusable

to discuss the turpitude of parents with a child of twelve, of thirteen, of fourteen. Absolutely inexcusable and

quite impossible it of course at first appeared; and indeed the question didn't press for some time after

Pemberton had received his three hundred francs. They produced a temporary lull, a relief from the sharpest

pressure. The young man frugally amended his wardrobe and even had a few francs in his pocket. He thought

the Moreens looked at him as if he were almost too smart, as if they ought to take care not to spoil him. If Mr.

Moreen hadn't been such a man of the world he would perhaps have spoken of the freedom of such neckties

on the part of a subordinate. But Mr. Moreen was always enough a man of the world to let things pass he

had certainly shown that. It was singular how Pemberton guessed that Morgan, though saying nothing about

it, knew something had happened. But three hundred francs, especially when one owed money, couldn't last

for ever; and when the treasure was gone the boy knew when it had failed Morgan did break ground. The

party had returned to Nice at the beginning of the winter, but not to the charming villa. They went to an hotel,

where they stayed three months, and then moved to another establishment, explaining that they had left the

first because, after waiting and waiting, they couldn't get the rooms they wanted. These apartments, the rooms

they wanted, were generally very splendid; but fortunately they never COULD get them fortunately, I

mean, for Pemberton, who reflected always that if they had got them there would have been a still scantier

educational fund. What Morgan said at last was said suddenly, irrelevantly, when the moment came, in the

middle of a lesson, and consisted of the apparently unfeeling words: "You ought to filer, you know you

Pemberton stared. He had learnt enough French slang from Morgan to know that to filer meant to cut sticks.

Morgan pulled a Greek lexicon toward him he used a GreekGerman to look out a word, instead of

"Don't pay me?" Pemberton stared again and feigned amazement. "What on earth put that into your head?"

Pemberton was silent, then he went on: "I say, what are you hunting for? They pay me beautifully."

"Find that rather for gross impertinence and disabuse your mind. What do I want of money?"

Pemberton wavered he was drawn in different ways. The severely correct thing would have been to tell the

boy that such a matter was none of his business and bid him go on with his lines. But they were really too

intimate for that; it was not the way he was in the habit of treating him; there had been no reason it should be.

On the other hand Morgan had quite lighted on the truth he really shouldn't be able to keep it up much

longer; therefore why not let him know one's real motive for forsaking him? At the same time it wasn't decent

to abuse to one's pupil the family of one's pupil; it was better to misrepresent than to do that. So in reply to

his comrade's last exclamation he just declared, to dismiss the subject, that he had received several payments.

Morgan pushed a copybook across the table, and he began to read the page, but with something running in his

head that made it no sense. Looking up after a minute or two he found the child's eyes fixed on him and felt

in them something strange. Then Morgan said: "I'm not afraid of the stern reality."

This came out with a jump it was perfectly true and evidently gave Morgan pleasure. "I've thought of it a

The boy appeared to comply, and they had a comfortable and even an amusing hour. They had a theory that

they were very thorough, and yet they seemed always to be in the amusing part of lessons, the intervals

between the dull dark tunnels, where there were waysides and jolly views. Yet the morning was brought to a

violent as end by Morgan's suddenly leaning his arms on the table, burying his head in them and bursting into

tears: at which Pemberton was the more startled that, as it then came over him, it was the first time he had

The next day, after much thought, he took a decision and, believing it to be just, immediately acted on it. He

cornered Mr. and Mrs. Moreen again and let them know that if on the spot they didn't pay him all they owed

him he wouldn't only leave their house but would tell Morgan exactly what had brought him to it.

"Oh you HAVEN'T told him?" cried Mrs. Moreen with a pacifying hand on her welldressed bosom.

Mr. and Mrs. Moreen looked at each other; he could see that they appreciated, as tending to their security, his

superstition of delicacy, and yet that there was a certain alarm in their relief. "My dear fellow," Mr. Moreen

demanded, "what use can you have, leading the quiet life we all do, for such a lot of money?" a question to

which Pemberton made no answer, occupied as he was in noting that what passed in the mind of his patrons

was something like: "Oh then, if we've felt that the child, dear little angel, has judged us and how he regards

us, and we haven't been betrayed, he must have guessed and in short it's GENERAL!" an inference that

rather stirred up Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, as Pemberton had desired it should. At the same time, if he had

supposed his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was disappointed to find them

taking for granted how vulgar their perception HAD been! that he had already given them away. There

was a mystic uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the inferior sense of it. None the less

however, his threat did touch them; for if they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger. Mr. Moreen

appealed to him, on every precedent, as a man of the world; but his wife had recourse, for the first time since

his domestication with them, to a fine hauteur, reminding him that a devoted mother, with her child, had arts

"I should misrepresent you grossly if I accused you of common honesty!" our friend replied; but as he closed

the door behind him sharply, thinking he had not done himself much good, while Mr. Moreen lighted another

The next morning, very early, she came to his room. He recognised her knock, but had no hope she brought

him money; as to which he was wrong, for she had fifty francs in her hand. She squeezed forward in her

dressinggown, and he received her in his own, between his bathtub and his bed. He had been tolerably

schooled by this time to the "foreign ways" of his hosts. Mrs. Moreen was ardent, and when she was ardent

she didn't care what she did; so she now sat down on his bed, his clothes being on the chairs, and, in her

preoccupation, forgot, as she glanced round, to be ashamed of giving him such a horrid room. What Mrs.

Moreen's ardour now bore upon was the design of persuading him that in the first place she was very

goodnatured to bring him fifty francs, and that in the second, if he would only see it, he was really too

absurd to expect to be paid. Wasn't he paid enough without perpetual money wasn't he paid by the

comfortable luxurious home he enjoyed with them all, without a care, an anxiety, a solitary want? Wasn't he

sure of his position, and wasn't that everything to a young man like him, quite unknown, with singularly little

to show, the ground of whose exorbitant pretensions it had never been easy to discover? Wasn't he paid above

all by the sweet relation he had established with Morgan quite ideal as from master to pupil and by the

simple privilege of knowing and living with so amazingly gifted a child; than whom really (and she meant

literally what she said) there was no better company in Europe? Mrs. Moreen herself took to appealing to him

as a man of the world; she said "Voyons, mon cher," and "My dear man, look here now"; and urged him to be

reasonable, putting it before him that it was truly a chance for him. She spoke as if, according as he SHOULD

be reasonable, he would prove himself worthy to be her son's tutor and of the extraordinary confidence they

After all, Pemberton reflected, it was only a difference of theory and the theory didn't matter much. They had

hitherto gone on that of remunerated, as now they would go on that of gratuitous, service; but why should

they have so many words about it? Mrs. Moreen at all events continued to be convincing; sitting there with

her fifty francs she talked and reiterated, as women reiterate, and bored and irritated him, while he leaned

against the wall with his hands in the pockets of his wrapper, drawing it together round his legs and looking

over the head of his visitor at the grey negations of his window. She wound up with saying: "You see I bring

"To make our relations regular, as it were to put them on a comfortable footing."

Mrs. Moreen bounded up, which was exactly what he wanted. "What do you mean by that?"

"You practise on one's fears one's fears about the child if one should go away."

"I think he ought to. I make sacrifices for him. Though I've heard of those YOU make I don't see them."

Mrs. Moreen stared a moment; then with emotion she grasped her inmate's hand. "WILL you make it the

He burst out laughing. "I'll see. I'll do what I can. I'll stay a little longer. Your calculation's just I DO hate

intensely to give him up; I'm fond of him and he thoroughly interests me, in spite of the inconvenience I

suffer. You know my situation perfectly. I haven't a penny in the world and, occupied as you see me with

Mrs. Moreen tapped her undressed arm with her folded banknote. "Can't you write articles? Can't you

"You ought to tell me who you do it for." Pemberton paused a moment, and she said nothing; so he added:

"I've tried to turn off some little sketches, but the magazines won't have them they're declined with thanks."

"You see then you're not such a phoenix," his visitor pointedly smiled "to pretend to abilities you're

"I haven't time to do things properly," he ruefully went on. Then as it came over him that he was almost

abjectly goodnatured to give these explanations he added: "If I stay on longer it must be on one condition

Again she cast about, but this time it was to produce a still finer flower. "And YOU talk of blackmail!"

His patroness met his eyes it was clear she was in straits. Then she thrust out her money at him. "Mr.

She fixed him a moment, and he thought she was going to break out tormentedly, pleadingly: "For God's

sake, tell me what IS in it!" But she checked this impulse another was stronger. She pocketed the money

the crudity of the alternative was comical and swept out of the room with the desperate concession: "You

A couple of days after this, during which he had failed to profit by so free a permission, he had been for a

quarter of an hour walking with his charge in silence when the boy became sociable again with the remark:

"A nurse I used to have ever so many years ago. A charming woman. I liked her awfully, and she liked

"Why what their idea is. She went away because they didn't fork out. She did like me awfully, and she stayed

two years. She told me all about it that at last she could never get her wages. As soon as they saw how

much she liked me they stopped giving her anything. They thought she'd stay for nothing just BECAUSE,

don't you know?" And Morgan had a queer little conscious lucid look. "She did stay ever so long as long an

she could. She was only a poor girl. She used to send money to her mother. At last she couldn't afford it any

longer, and went away in a fearful rage one night I mean of course in a rage against THEM. She cried over

me tremendously, she hugged me nearly to death. She told me all about it," the boy repeated. "She told me it

was their idea. So I guessed, ever so long ago, that they have had the same idea with you."

"Certainly I was a part of hers, poor dear!" the boy wisely sighed. "And I'm part of yours."

"A very important part. But I don't see how you know that I've been treated like Zenobie."

"Do you take me for the biggest dunce you've known?" Morgan asked. "Haven't I been conscious of what

Morgan went on in silence for a moment. Then he said: "My dear chap, you're a hero!"

"No I'm not, but I ain't a baby. I won't stand it any longer. You must get some occupation that pays. I'm

ashamed, I'm ashamed!" quavered the boy with a ring of passion, like some high silver note from a small

"So would I. Why shouldn't I work? I ain't such a beastly little muff as that comes to."

"The difficulty is that your parents wouldn't hear of it. They'd never part with you; they worship the ground

you tread on. Don't you see the proof of it?" Pemberton developed. "They don't dislike me; they wish me no

harm; they're very amiable people; but they're perfectly ready to expose me to any awkwardness in life for

The silence in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck Pemberton somehow as expressive. After a

moment the child repeated: "You are a hero!" Then he added: "They leave me with you altogether. You've all

the responsibility. They put me off on you from morning till night. Why then should they object to my taking

"They're not particularly keen about my being helped, and they delight in thinking of you as THEIRS.

"Except for the little matter we speak of they're charming people," said Pemberton, not taking up the point

made for his intelligence, but wondering greatly at the boy's own, and especially at this fresh reminder of

something he had been conscious of from the first the strangest thing in his friend's large little composition,

a temper, a sensibility, even a private ideal, which made him as privately disown the stuff his people were

made of. Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed meanness; as well as a

critical sense for the manners immediately surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile

nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature "oldfashioned," as the word is of children

quaint or wizened or offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had paid the penalty by

discovering that he was the only such person in his family. This comparison didn't make him vain, but it

could make him melancholy and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things,

shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting

to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself the

morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw it was never fixed, never arrested, that

ignorance, at the instant he touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was nothing

that at a given moment you could say an intelligent child didn't know. It seemed to him that he himself knew

too much to imagine Morgan's simplicity and too little to disembroil his tangle.

The boy paid no heed to his last remark; he only went on: "I'd have spoken to them about their idea, as I call

"Just what they said about what poor Zenobie told me that it was a horrid dreadful story, that they had paid

"They accused her of lying and cheating" Morgan stuck to historic truth. "That's why I don't want to speak

"Lest they should accuse me, too?" To this Morgan made no answer, and his companion, looking down at

him the boy turned away his eyes, which had filled saw what he couldn't have trusted himself to utter.

"You're right. Don't worry them," Pemberton pursued. "Except for that, they ARE charming people."

"I say I say!" cried Pemberton, imitating a little tone of the lad's which was itself an imitation.

"We must be frank, at the last; we MUST come to an understanding," said Morgan with the importance of the

small boy who lets himself think he is arranging great affairs almost playing at shipwreck or at Indians. "I

"I dare say your father has his reasons,'' Pemberton replied, but too vaguely, as he was aware.

"For saving and managing and turning his means to the best account. He has plenty to do with his money.

"Yes, I'm very expensive," Morgan concurred in a manner that made his preceptor burst out laughing.

"He's saving for YOU," said Pemberton. "They think of you in everything they do."

"He might, while he's about it, save a little " The boy paused, and his friend waited to hear what. Then

"Enough of it for the people they know, no doubt. The people they know are awful."

"Why not? They haven't married Paula they haven't married Amy. They only clean out Ulick."

"No, I don't, after all. I don't know what they live on, or how they live, or WHY they live! What have they

got and how did they get it? Are they rich, are they poor, or have they a modeste aisance? Why are they

always chiveying me about living one year like ambassadors and the next like paupers? Who are they, any

way, and what are they? I've thought of all that I've thought of a lot of things. They're so beastly worldly.

That's what I hate most oh, I've SEEN it! All they care about is to make an appearance and to pass for

something or other. What the dickens do they want to pass for? What DO they, Mr. Pemberton?"

"You pause for a reply," said Pemberton, treating the question as a joke, yet wondering too and greatly struck

"And what good does it do? Haven't I seen the way people treat them the 'nice' people, the ones they want

to know? They'll take anything from them they'll lie down and be trampled on. The nice ones hate that

"Well, you shan't lie down for them. You've got to go that's what you've got to do," said Morgan.

"You had better let me finish you," Pemberton urged, lending himself to the child's strange superiority.

Morgan stopped in their walk, looking up at him. He had to look up much less than a couple of years before

"There are such a lot of jolly things we can do together yet. I want to turn you out I want you to do me

"That's just what I'm afraid you think. No, no; it isn't fair I can't endure it. We'll separate next week. The

Morgan consented to consider this. "But you'll be honest," he demanded; "you won't pretend you haven't

"But what can you hear of, this way, stuck in a hole with us? You ought to be on the spot, to go to England

Morgan walked on and after a little had begun again: "Well, now that you know I know and that we look at

"My dear boy, it's so amusing, so interesting, that it will surely be quite impossible for me to forego such

This made Morgan stop once more. "You DO keep something back. Oh you're not straight I am!"

"Why that I probably shan't make old make older bones, and that you can stick it out till I'm removed."

"I call it a mean idea," Morgan pursued. "But I shall punish you by the way I hang on."

"I'm stronger and better every year. Haven't you noticed that there hasn't been a doctor near me since you

"I'M your doctor," said the young man, taking his arm and drawing him tenderly on again.

Morgan proceeded and after a few steps gave a sigh of mingled weariness and relief. "Ah now that we look at

They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the first consequences of their doing so was that

Pemberton stuck it out, in his friend's parlance, for the purpose. Morgan made the facts so vivid and so droll,

and at the same time so bald and so ugly, that there was fascination in talking them over with him, just as

there would have been heartlessness in leaving him alone with them. Now that the pair had such perceptions

in common it was useless for them to pretend they didn't judge such people; but the very judgement and the

exchange of perceptions created another tie. Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he himself was

made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences. What came out in it most was the small fine passion of his

pride. He had plenty of that, Pemberton felt so much that one might perhaps wisely wish for it some early

bruises. He would have liked his people to have a spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually

eating humblepie. His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume even more than

his mother. He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled out of an "affair" at Nice: there had once been a flurry at

home, a regular panic, after which they all went to bed and took medicine, not to be accounted for on any

other supposition. Morgan had a romantic imagination, led by poetry and history, and he would have liked

those who "bore his name" as he used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made his queer delicacies

manly to carry themselves with an air. But their one idea was to get in with people who didn't want them

and to take snubs as it they were honourable scars. Why people didn't want them more he didn't know that

was people's own affair; after all they weren't superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times cleverer than

most of the dreary grandees, the "poor swells" they rushed about Europe to catch up with. "After all they

ARE amusing they are!" he used to pronounce with the wisdom of the ages. To which Pemberton always

replied: "Amusing the great Moreen troupe? Why they're altogether delightful; and if it weren't for the hitch

that you and I (feeble performers!) make in the ensemble they'd carry everything before them."

What the boy couldn't get over was the fact that this particular blight seemed, in a tradition of selfrespect, so

undeserved and so arbitrary. No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should his

people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and cheating? What had their forefathers all

decent folk, so far as he knew done to them, or what had he done to them? Who had poisoned their blood

with the fifthrate social ideal, the fixed idea of making smart acquaintances and getting into the monde chic,

especially when it was foredoomed to failure and exposure? They showed so what they were after; that was

what made the people they wanted not want THEM. And never a wince for dignity, never a throb of shame at

looking each other in the face, never any independence or resentment or disgust. If his father or his brother

would only knock some one down once or twice a year! Clever as they were they never guessed the

impression they made. They were goodnatured, yes as goodnatured as Jews at the doors of

clothingshops! But was that the model one wanted one's family to follow? Morgan had dim memories of an

old grandfather, the maternal, in New York, whom he had been taken across the ocean at the age of five to

see: a gentleman with a high neckcloth and a good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dresscoat in the

morning, which made one wonder what he wore in the evening, and had, or was supposed to have "property"

and something to do with the Bible Society. It couldn't have been but that he was a good type. Pemberton

himself remembered Mrs. Clancy, a widowed sister of Mr. Moreen's, who was as irritating as a moral tale and

had paid a fortnight's visit to the family at Nice shortly after he came to live with them. She was "pure and

refined," as Amy said over the banjo, and had the air of not knowing what they meant when they talked, and

of keeping something rather important back. Pemberton judged that what she kept back was an approval of

many of their ways; therefore it was to be supposed that she too was of a good type, and that Mr. and Mrs.

Moreen and Ulick and Paula and Amy might easily have been of a better one if they would.

But that they wouldn't was more and more perceptible from day to day. They continued to "chivey," as

Morgan called it, and in due time became aware of a variety of reasons for proceeding to Venice. They

mentioned a great many of them they were always strikingly frank and had the brightest friendly chatter, at

the late foreign breakfast in especial, before the ladies had made up their faces, when they leaned their arms

on the table, had something to follow the demitasse, and, in the heat of familiar discussion as to what they

"really ought" to do, fell inevitably into the languages in which they could tutoyer. Even Pemberton liked

them then; he could endure even Ulick when he heard him give his little flat voice for the "sweet seacity."

That was what made him have a sneaking kindness for them that they were so out of the workaday world

and kept him so out of it. The summer had waned when, with cries of ecstasy, they all passed out on the

balcony that overhung the Grand Canal. The sunsets then were splendid and the Dorringtons had arrived. The

Dorringtons were the only reason they hadn't talked of at breakfast; but the reasons they didn't talk of at

breakfast always came out in the end. The Dorringtons on the other hand came out very little; or else when

they did they stayed as was natural for hours, during which periods Mrs. Moreen and the girls sometimes

called at their hotel (to see if they had returned) as many as three times running. The gondola was for the

ladies, as in Venice too there were "days," which Mrs. Moreen knew in their order an hour after she arrived.

She immediately took one herself, to which the Dorringtons never came, though on a certain occasion when

Pemberton and his pupil were together at St. Mark's where, taking the best walks they had ever had and

haunting a hundred churches, they spent a great deal of time they saw the old lord turn up with Mr. Moreen

and Ulick, who showed him the dim basilica as if it belonged to them. Pemberton noted how much less,

among its curiosities, Lord Dorrington carried himself as a man of the world; wondering too whether, for

such services, his companions took a fee from him. The autumn at any rate waned, the Dorringtons departed,

and Lord Verschoyle, the eldest son, had proposed neither for Amy nor for Paula.

One sad November day, while the wind roared round the old palace and the rain lashed the lagoon,

Pemberton, for exercise and even somewhat for warmth the Moreens were horribly frugal about fires; it

was a cause of suffering to their inmate walked up and down the big bare sala with his pupil. The scagliola

floor was cold, the high battered casements shook in the storm, and the stately decay of the place was

unrelieved by a particle of furniture. Pemberton's spirits were low, and it came over him that the fortune of

the Moreens was now even lower. A blast of desolation, a portent of disgrace and disaster, seemed to draw

through the comfortless hall. Mr. Moreen and Ulick were in the Piazza, looking out for something, strolling

drearily, in mackintoshes, under the arcades; but still, in spite of mackintoshes, unmistakeable men of the

world. Paula and Amy were in bed it might have been thought they were staying there to keep warm.

Pemberton looked askance at the boy at his side, to see to what extent he was conscious of these dark omens.

But Morgan, luckily for him, was now mainly conscious of growing taller and stronger and indeed of being in

his fifteenth year. This fact was intensely interesting to him and the basis of a private theory which,

however, he had imparted to his tutor that in a little while he should stand on his own feet. He considered

that the situation would change that in short he should be "finished," grown up, producible in the world of

affairs and ready to prove himself of sterling ability. Sharply as he was capable at times of analysing, as he

called it, his life, there were happy hours when he remained, as he also called it and as the name, really, of

their right ideal "jolly" superficial; the proof of which was his fundamental assumption that he should

presently go to Oxford, to Pemberton's college, and, aided and abetted by Pemberton, do the most wonderful

things. It depressed the young man to see how little in such a project he took account of ways and means: in

other connexions he mostly kept to the measure. Pemberton tried to imagine the Moreens at Oxford and

fortunately failed; yet unless they were to adopt it as a residence there would be no modus vivendi for

Morgan. How could he live without an allowance, and where was the allowance to come from? He,

Pemberton, might live on Morgan; but how could Morgan live on HIM? What was to become of him

anyhow? Somehow the fact that he was a big boy now, with better prospects of health, made the question of

his future more difficult. So long as he was markedly frail the great consideration he inspired seemed enough

of an answer to it. But at the bottom of Pemberton's heart was the recognition of his probably being strong

enough to live and not yet strong enough to struggle or to thrive. Morgan himself at any rate was in the first

flush of the rosiest consciousness of adolescence, so that the beating of the tempest seemed to him after all

but the voice of life and the challenge of fate. He had on his shabby little overcoat, with the collar up, but was

It was interrupted at last by the appearance of his mother at the end of the sala. She beckoned him to come to

her, and while Pemberton saw him, complaisant, pass down the long vista and over the damp false marble, he

wondered what was in the air. Mrs. Moreen said a word to the boy and made him go into the room she had

quitted. Then, having closed the door after him, she directed her steps swiftly to Pemberton. There was

something in the air, but his wildest flight of fancy wouldn't have suggested what it proved to be. She

signified that she had made a pretext to get Morgan out of the way, and then she enquired without

hesitation if the young man could favour her with the loan of three louis. While, before bursting into a

laugh, he stared at her with surprise, she declared that she was awfully pressed for the money; she was

"Dear lady, c'est trop fort!" Pemberton laughed in the manner and with the borrowed grace of idiom that

marked the best colloquial, the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves. "Where in the world do

Mrs. Moreen stared, then she coloured a little. Pemberton saw she had quite forgotten the terms if "terms"

they could be called that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her memory as little as

her conscience. "Oh yes, I see what you mean you've been very nice about that; but why drag it in so

often?" She had been perfectly urbane with him ever since the rough scene of explanation in his room the

morning he made her accept HIS "terms" the necessity of his making his case known to Morgan. She had

felt no resentment after seeing there was no danger Morgan would take the matter up with her. Indeed,

attributing this immunity to the good taste of his influence with the boy, she had once said to Pemberton "My

dear fellow, it's an immense comfort you're a gentleman." She repeated this in substance now. "Of course

you're a gentleman that's a bother the less!" Pemberton reminded her that he had not "dragged in" anything

that wasn't already in as much as his foot was in his shoe; and she also repeated her prayer that, somewhere

and somehow, he would find her sixty francs. He took the liberty of hinting that if he could find them it

wouldn't be to lend them to HER as to which he consciously did himself injustice, knowing that if he had

them he would certainly put them at her disposal. He accused himself, at bottom and not unveraciously, of a

fantastic, a demoralised sympathy with her. If misery made strange bedfellows it also made strange

sympathies. It was moreover a part of the abasement of living with such people that one had to make vulgar

retorts, quite out of one's own tradition of good manners. "Morgan, Morgan, to what pass have I come for

you?" he groaned while Mrs. Moreen floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate the boy, wailing as

Before their young friend was liberated there came a thump at the door communicating with the staircase,

followed by the apparition of a dripping youth who poked in his head. Pemberton recognised him as the

bearer of a telegram and recognised the telegram as addressed to himself. Morgan came back as, after

glancing at the signature that of a relative in London he was reading the words: "Found a jolly job for

you, engagement to coach opulent youth on own terms. Come at once." The answer happily was paid and the

messenger waited. Morgan, who had drawn near, waited too and looked hard at Pemberton; and Pemberton,

after a moment, having met his look, handed him the telegram. It was really by wise looks they knew each

other so well now that, while the telegraphboy, in his waterproof cape, made a great puddle on the floor,

the thing was settled between them. Pemberton wrote the answer with a pencil against the frescoed wall, and

"I'll make a tremendous charge; I'll earn a lot of money in a short time, and we'll live on it."

"Well, I hope the opulent youth will be a dismal dunce he probably will " Morgan parenthesised "and

"Oh there are not two such !" But Pemberton pulled up; he had been on the point of using too invidious a

Morgan flushed the tears came to his eyes. "Dites toujours two such rascally crews!" Then in a different

"Oh they're happier then. But you can't have everything, can you?" the boy smiled.

Pemberton held him fast, hands on his shoulders he had never loved him so. "What will become of you,

"I shall become an homme fait." And then as if he recognised all the bearings of Pemberton's allusion: "I shall

"You do the sight of you. It's all right; you know what I mean. I shall be beautiful. I'll take their affairs in

"You'll marry yourself!" joked Pemberton; as high, rather tense pleasantry would evidently be the right, or

It was, however, not purely in this strain that Morgan suddenly asked: "But I say how will you get to your

Then Pemberton brought out his remedy. "I'll go to the American Consul; I'll borrow some money of him

Pemberton entered into the joke sufficiently to reply that for Morgan he was really capable of that; but the

boy, growing more serious, and to prove he hadn't meant what he said, not only hurried him off to the

Consulate since he was to start that evening, as he had wired to his friend but made sure of their affair by

going with him. They splashed through the tortuous perforations and over the humpbacked bridges, and they

passed through the Piazza, where they saw Mr. Moreen and Ulick go into a jeweller's shop. The Consul

proved accommodating Pemberton said it wasn't the letter, but Morgan's grand air and on their way back

they went into Saint Mark's for a hushed ten minutes. Later they took up and kept up the fun of it to the very

end; and it seemed to Pemberton a part of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was very angry when he had

announced her his intention, should charge him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in reference to the loan she had

vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting lest they should "get something out" of him. On the other hand he

had to do Mr. Moreen and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in they heard the cruel news

When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand for Balliol, he found himself

unable to say if this aspirant had really such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten of his own

long association with an intensely living little mind. From Morgan he heard half a dozen times: the boy wrote

charming young letters, a patchwork of tongues, with indulgent postscripts in the family Volapuk and, in

little squares and rounds and crannies of the text, the drollest illustrations letters that he was divided

between the impulse to show his present charge as a vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of something in

them that publicity would profane. The opulent youth went up in due course and failed to pass; but it seemed

to add to the presumption that brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his parents, condoning the

lapse, which they goodnaturedly treated as little as possible as if it were Pemberton's, should have sounded

The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three louis, and he sent her a postoffice order

even for a larger amount. In return for this favour he received a frantic scribbled line from her: "Implore you

to come back instantly Morgan dread fully ill." They were on there rebound, once more in Paris often as

Pemberton had seen them depressed he had never seen them crushed and communication was therefore

rapid. He wrote to the boy to ascertain the state of his health, but awaited the answer in vain. He accordingly,

after three days, took an abrupt leave of the opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small

hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysees, of which Mrs. Moreen had given him the address. A deep if

dumb dissatisfaction with this lady and her companions bore him company: they couldn't be vulgarly honest,

but they could live at hotels, in velvety entresols, amid a smell of burnt pastilles, surrounded by the most

expensive city in Europe. When he had left them in Venice it was with an irrepressible suspicion that

something was going to happen; but the only thing that could have taken place was again their masterly

retreat. "How is he? where is he?" he asked of Mrs. Moreen; but before she could speak these questions were

answered by the pressure round hid neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves, which still were perfectly

"Dreadfully ill I don't see it!" the young man cried. And then to Morgan: "Why on earth didn't you relieve

Mrs. Moreen declared that when she wrote he was very bad, and Pemberton learned at the same time from the

boy that he had answered every letter he had received. This led to the clear inference that Pemberton's note

had been kept from him so that the game practised should not be interfered with. Mrs. Moreen was prepared

to see the fact exposed, as Pemberton saw the moment he faced her that she was prepared for a good many

other things. She was prepared above all to maintain that she had acted from a sense of duty, that she was

enchanted she had got him over, whatever they might say, and that it was useless of him to pretend he didn't

know in all his bones that his place at such a time was with Morgan. He had taken the boy away from them

and now had no right to abandon him. He had created for himself the gravest responsibilities and must at least

"Do it do it for pity's sake; that's just what I want. I can't stand THIS and such scenes. They're awful

frauds poor dears!" These words broke from Morgan, who had intermitted his embrace, in a key which

made Pemberton turn quickly to him and see that he had suddenly seated himself, was breathing in great pain,

"NOW do you say he's not in a state, my precious pet?" shouted his mother, dropping on her knees before

him with clasped hands, but touching him no more than if he had been a gilded idol. "It will pass it's only

"I'm all right all right," Morgan panted to Pemberton, whom he sat looking up at with a strange smile, his

"Now do you pretend I've been dishonest, that I've deceived?" Mrs. Moreen flashed at Pemberton as she got

"It isn't HE says it, it's I!" the boy returned, apparently easier, but sinking back against the wall; while his

"Darling child, one does what one can; there are so many things to consider," urged Mrs. Moreen. "It's his

"Take me away take me away," Morgan went on, smiling to Pemberton with his white face.

"Where shall I take you, and how oh HOW, my boy?" the young man stammered, thinking of the rude way

in which his friends in London held that, for his convenience, with no assurance of prompt return, he had

thrown them over; of the just resentment with which they would already have called in a successor, and of the

scant help to finding fresh employment that resided for him in the grossness of his having failed to pass his

"Oh we'll settle that. You used to talk about it," said Morgan. "If we can only go all the rest's a detail."

"Talk about it as much as you like, but don't think you can attempt it. Mr. Moreen would never consent it

would be so VERY handto mouth," Pemberton's hostess beautifully explained to him. Then to Morgan she

made it clearer: "It would destroy our peace, it would break our hearts. Now that he's back it will be all the

same again. You'll have your life, your work and your freedom, and we'll all be happy as we used to be.

You'll bloom and grow perfectly well, and we won't have any more silly experiments, will we? They're too

absurd. It's Mr. Pemberton's place every one in his place. You in yours, your papa in his, me in mine

n'estce pas, cheri? We'll all forget how foolish we've been and have lovely times."

She continued to talk and to surge vaguely about the little draped stuffy salon while Pemberton sat with the

boy, whose colour gradually came back; and she mixed up her reasons, hinting that there were going to be

changes, that the other children might scatter (who knew? Paula had her ideas) and that then it might be

fancied how much the poor old parentbirds would want the little nestling. Morgan looked at Pemberton,

who wouldn't let him move; and Pemberton knew exactly how he felt at hearing himself called a little

nestling. He admitted that he had had one or two bad days, but he protested afresh against the wrong of his

mother's having made them the ground of an appeal to poor Pemberton. Poor Pemberton could laugh now,

apart from the comicality of Mrs. Moreen's mustering so much philosophy for her defence she seemed to

shake it out of her agitated petticoats, which knocked over the light gilt chairs so little did their young

companion, MARKED, unmistakeably marked at the best, strike him as qualified to repudiate any advantage.

He himself was in for it at any rate. He should have Morgan on his hands again indefinitely; though indeed he

saw the lad had a private theory to produce which would be intended to smooth this down. He was obliged to

him for it in advance; but the suggested amendment didn't keep his heart rather from sinking, any more than it

prevented him from accepting the prospect on the spot, with some confidence moreover that he should do so

even better if he could have a little supper. Mrs. Moreen threw out more hints about the changes that were to

be looked for, but she was such a mixture of smiles and shudders she confessed she was very nervous that

he couldn't tell if she were in high feather or only in hysterics. If the family was really at last going to pieces

why shouldn't she recognise the necessity of pitching Morgan into some sort of lifeboat? This presumption

was fostered by the fact that they were established in luxurious quarters in the capital of pleasure; that was

exactly where they naturally WOULD be established in view of going to pieces. Moreover didn't she mention

that Mr. Moreen and the others were enjoying themselves at the opera with Mr. Granger, and wasn't THAT

also precisely where one would look for them on the eve of a smash? Pemberton gathered that Mr. Granger

was a rich vacant American a big bill with a flourishy heading and no items; so that one of Paula's "ideas"

was probably that this time she hadn't missed fire by which straight shot indeed she would have shattered

the general cohesion. And if the cohesion was to crumble what would become of poor Pemberton? He felt

quite enough bound up with them to figure to his alarm as a dislodged block in the edifice.

It was Morgan who eventually asked if no supper had been ordered for him; sitting with him below, later, at

the dim delayed meal, in the presence of a great deal of corded green plush, a plate of ornamental biscuit and

an aloofness marked on the part of the waiter. Mrs. Moreen had explained that they had been obliged to

secure a room for the visitor out of the house; and Morgan's consolation he offered it while Pemberton

reflected on the nastiness of lukewarm sauces proved to be, largely, that his circumstance would facilitate

their escape. He talked of their escape recurring to it often afterwards as if they were making up a "boy's

book" together. But he likewise expressed his sense that there was something in the air, that the Moreens

couldn't keep it up much longer. In point of fact, as Pemberton was to see, they kept it up for five or six

months. All the while, however, Morgan's contention was designed to cheer him. Mr. Moreen and Ulick,

whom he had met the day after his return, accepted that return like perfect men of the world. If Paula and

Amy treated it even with less formality an allowance was to be made for them, inasmuch as Mr. Granger

hadn't come to the opera after all. He had only placed his box at their service, with a bouquet for each of the

party; there was even one apiece, embittering the thought of his profusion, for Mr. Moreen and Ulick.

"They're all like that," was Morgan's comment; "at the very last, just when we think we've landed them

Morgan's comments in these days were more and more free; they even included a large recognition of the

extraordinary tenderness with which he had been treated while Pemberton was away. Oh yes, they couldn't do

enough to be nice to him, to show him they had him on their mind and make up for his loss. That was just

what made the whole thing so sad and caused him to rejoice after all in Pemberton's return he had to keep

thinking of their affection less, had less sense of obligation. Pemberton laughed out at this last reason, and

Morgan blushed and said: "Well, dash it, you know what I mean." Pemberton knew perfectly what he meant;

but there were a good many things that dash it too! it didn't make any clearer. This episode of his second

sojourn in Paris stretched itself out wearily, with their resumed readings and wanderings and maunderings,

their potterings on the quays, their hauntings of the museums, their occasional lingerings in the Palais Royal

when the first sharp weather came on and there was a comfort in warm emanations, before Chevet's

wonderful succulent window. Morgan wanted to hear all about the opulent youth he took an immense

interest in him. Some of the details of his opulence Pemberton could spare him none of them evidently

fed the boy's appreciation of all his friend had given up to come back to him; but in addition to the greater

reciprocity established by that heroism he had always his little brooding theory, in which there was a

frivolous gaiety too, that their long probation was drawing to a close. Morgan's conviction that the Moreens

couldn't go on much longer kept pace with the unexpended impetus with which, from month to month, they

did go on. Three weeks after Pemberton had rejoined them they went on to another hotel, a dingier one than

the first; but Morgan rejoiced that his tutor had at least still not sacrificed the advantage of a room outside. He

clung to the romantic utility of this when the day, or rather the night, should arrive for their escape.

For the first time, in this complicated connexion, our friend felt his collar gall him. It was, as he had said to

Mrs. Moreen in Venice, trop fort everything was trop fort. He could neither really throw off his blighting

burden nor find in it the benefit of a pacified conscience or of a rewarded affection. He had spent all the

money accruing to him in England, and he saw his youth going and that he was getting nothing back for it. It

was all very well of Morgan to count it for reparation that he should now settle on him permanently there

was an irritating flaw in such a view. He saw what the boy had in his mind; the conception that as his friend

had had the generosity to come back he must show his gratitude by giving him his life. But the poor friend

didn't desire the gift what could he do with Morgan's dreadful little life? Of course at the same time that

Pemberton was irritated he remembered the reason, which was very honourable to Morgan and which dwelt

simply in his making one so forget that he was no more than a patched urchin. If one dealt with him on a

different basis one's misadventures were one's own fault. So Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of

yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he

certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much in what form it

Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal a frightened sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish

corners. Certainly they were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they didn't

find. The Dorringtons hadn't reappeared, the princes had scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end?

Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social calendar was blurred it had turned its

face to the wall. Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable

behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they

wanted. He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which was never the path of a return.

Flowers were all very well, but Pemberton could complete the proposition. It was now positively

conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social failure; so that the young man was almost grateful

the run had not been short. Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away on business and, what

was more surprising, was likewise able to get back. Ulick had no club but you couldn't have discovered it

from his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life from the window of such an

institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother in the

desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations. Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it

appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to whom they might get to take Amy. "Let the Devil take her!"

Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to

believe in themselves. He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she

might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would be the last she would part with.

One winter afternoon it was a Sunday he and the boy walked far together in the Bois de Boulogne. The

evening was so splendid, the cold lemoncoloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedestrians so

amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they

should have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner. They hurried accordingly, arminarm,

goodhumoured and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that after everything too

that had come and gone they were not yet sated with innocent pleasures. When they reached the hotel they

found that, though scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely to sit down to.

Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house

and before the interrupted service of the table, with objects displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle and

a great wine stain from an overturned bottle, Pemberton couldn't blink the fact that there had been a scene of

the last proprietary firmness. The storm had come they were all seeking refuge. The hatches were down,

Paula and Amy were invisible they had never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had

enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been confiscated and

Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard. The host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to "go on" at the pace

of their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was

strangely commingled with the air of indignant withdrawal. When Morgan took all this in and he took it in

very quickly he coloured to the roots of his hair. He had walked from his infancy among difficulties and

dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure. Pemberton noticed in a second glance at him that the tears

had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of a new and untasted bitterness. He wondered an instant,

for the boy's sake, whether he might successfully pretend not to understand. Not successfully, he felt, as Mr.

and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth, rose before him in their little dishonoured salon,

casting about with glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm. They were not prostrate but were horribly

white, and Mrs. Moreen had evidently been crying. Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not

for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but the fruit of a blow that struck even deeper, as

she made all haste to explain. He would see for himself, so far as that went, how the great change had come,

the dreadful bolt had fallen, and how they would now all have to turn themselves about. Therefore cruel as it

was to them to part with their darling she must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so

fortunately acquired with the boy to induce his young charge to follow him into some modest retreat. They

depended on him that was the fact to take their delightful child temporarily under his protection; it would

leave Mr. Moreen and herself so much more free to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given)

"We trust you we feel we CAN," said Mrs. Moreen, slowly rubbing her plump white hands and looking

with compunction hard at Morgan, whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a paternal

"Oh yes we feel that we CAN. We trust Mr. Pemberton fully, Morgan," Mr. Moreen pursued.

Pemberton wondered again if he might pretend not to understand; but everything good gave way to the

intensity of Morgan's understanding. "Do you mean he may take me to live with him for ever and ever?"

"For ever and ever? Comme vousyallez!" Mr. Moreen laughed indulgently. "For as long as Mr. Pemberton

"We've struggled, we've suffered," his wife went on; "but you've made him so your own that we've already

Morgan had turned away from his father he stood looking at Pemberton with a light in his face. His sense

of shame for their common humiliated state had dropped; the case had another side the thing was to clutch

at THAT. He had a moment of boyish joy, scarcely mitigated by the reflexion that with this unexpected

consecration of his hope too sudden and too violent; the turn taken was away from a GOOD boy's book

the "escape" was left on their hands. The boyish joy was there an instant, and Pemberton was almost scared at

the rush of gratitude and affection that broke through his first abasement. When he stammered "My dear

fellow, what do you say to THAT?" how could one not say something enthusiastic? But there was more need

for courage at something else that immediately followed and that made the lad sit down quietly on the nearest

chair. He had turned quite livid and had raised his hand to his left side. They were all three looking at him,

but Mrs. Moreen suddenly bounded forward. "Ah his darling little heart!" she broke out; and this time, on her

knees before him and without respect for the idol, she caught him ardently in her arms. "You walked him too

far, you hurried him too fast!" she hurled over her shoulder at Pemberton. Her son made no protest, and the

next instant, still holding him, she sprang up with her face convulsed and with the terrified cry "Help, help!

he's going, he's gone!" Pemberton saw with equal horror, by Morgan's own stricken face, that he was beyond

their wildest recall. He pulled him half out of his mother's hands, and for a moment, while they held him

together, they looked all their dismay into each other's eyes, "He couldn't stand it with his weak organ," said

"I TOLD you he didn't, my dear," her husband made answer. Mr. Moreen was trembling all over and was in

his way as deeply affected as his wife. But after the very first he took his bereavement as a man of the world.