had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the
Moreens - for they had THEIR desperate proprieties - struck him as

topsy-turvy. 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 richlysupposed
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 - confessedly helplessly provisional.

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 drawing-room), 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 professionalacquaintance 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 elasticspoken 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 Spanish or German.
"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 wonderfullyamiable 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 three generations.

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 picked-up 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, where he smashed a dozen toys a day.

CHAPTER III
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 intimate way?"
"My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn't?"

"How do I know you'll stay? I'm almost sure you won't, very long."
"I hope you don't mean to dismiss me," said Pemberton.

Morgan debated, looking at the sunset. "I think if I did right I
ought to."