Chapter 2 - Page 2

novel, in Pemberton's memory of the queerness of the Moreens.
If it were not for a few tangible tokens--a lock of Morgan's hair cut by
his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were
disjoined--the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too
inconsequent for anything but dreamland. Their supreme quaintness was
their success--as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he
had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure. Wasn't it
success to have kept him so hatefully long? Wasn't it success to have
drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came--it was
enough to _make_ one superstitious--so that he utterly committed himself,
and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct
which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together? They
amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies. He was
still young and had not seen much of the world--his English years 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 richly supposed 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 professional acquaintance 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