The Pupil

by Henry James
CHAPTER I

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 casualobservation that he couldn't find it. As he dropped

this cynicalconfession 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 spoke to her - especially not to make her such
an improper answer as that.

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 expensiveidentity, 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 regular."

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 la-la!"
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 comes back you shall have it out with him."

This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply,
laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I don't imagine we shall have

much of a battle."
"They'll give you anything you like," the boy remarked

unexpectedly, returning from the window. "We don't mind what
anything costs - we live awfully well."

"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 intelligentinnocent 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
Pemberton.

"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."
"He tries to imitate me," Morgan said to their friend.

"He tries? Why he's twenty years old!" cried Mrs. Moreen.
"You're very witty," Pemberton remarked to the child - a

proposition his mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan's
sallies to be the delight of the house.

The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the
visitor, who was surprised afterwards that he hadn't struck him as

offensively forward: "Do you WANT very much to come?"
"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 glimpse of a far-off

appeal.
"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: