Morgan proceeded and after a few steps gave a sigh of mingled
weariness and relief. "Ah now that we look at the facts it's all

right!"
CHAPTER VII

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 humble-pie. 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 romanticimagination, 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 altogetherdelightful; 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 self-respect, 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 fifth-rate 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 good-natured, yes - as good-natured as Jews at the doors
of clothing-shops! 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 neck-cloth and a
good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dress-coat 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 sea-city." 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 horriblyfrugal 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