Chapter 4 - Page 2

son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs. Moreen
shrewdly forbore to renew his garments. She did nothing that didn't
show, neglected him because he escaped notice, and then, as he
illustrated this clever policy, discouraged at home his public
appearances. Her position was logical enough--those members of her
family who did show had to be showy.

During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of how he
and his comrade might strike people; wandering languidly through the
Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go, sitting on the winter
days in the galleries of the Louvre, so splendidly ironical to the
homeless, as if for the advantage of the calorifere. They joked about it
sometimes: it was the sort of joke that was perfectly within the boy's
compass. They figured themselves as part of the vast vague hand-to-mouth
multitude of the enormous city and pretended they were proud of their
position in it--it showed them "such a lot of life" and made them
conscious of a democratic brotherhood. If Pemberton couldn't feel a
sympathy in destitution with his small companion--for after all Morgan's
fond parents would never have let him really suffer--the boy would at
least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing. He used sometimes
to wonder what people would think they were--to fancy they were looked
askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping. Morgan
wouldn't be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor--he wasn't smart
enough; though he might pass for his companion's sickly little brother.
Now and then he had a five-franc piece, and except once, when they bought
a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they
laid it out scientifically in old books. This was sure to be a great
day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that
garnish the parapets. Such occasions helped them to live, for their
books ran low very soon after the beginning of their acquaintance.
Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a
friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow to give him something for
them.

If they had to relinquish that summer the advantage of the bracing
climate the young man couldn't but suspect this failure of the cup when
at their very lips to have been the effect of a rude jostle of his own.
This had represented his first blow-out, as he called it, with his
patrons; his first successful attempt--though there was little other
success about it--to bring them to a consideration of his impossible
position. As the ostensible eve of a costly journey the moment had
struck him as favourable to an earnest protest, the presentation of an
ultimatum. Ridiculous as it sounded, he had never yet been