Chapter 1 - Page 2

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 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 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