"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 HADbeen! - 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 that protected her against gross misrepresentation.
"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 cigarette, he heard his hostess shout after him more touchingly"Oh you do, you DO, put the knife to one's throat!"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 dressing-gown, and he received her in his own, between his bath-tub 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 good-natured 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 had placed in him.
