Chapter 6 - Page 2

take me."

"I'd get some work that would keep us both afloat," Pemberton continued.

"So would I. Why shouldn't I work? I ain't such a beastly little muff
as that comes to."

"The difficulty is that your parents wouldn't hear of it. They'd never
part with you; they worship the ground you tread on. Don't you see the
proof of it?" Pemberton developed. "They don't dislike me; they wish me
no harm; they're very amiable people; but they're perfectly ready to
expose me to any awkwardness in life for your sake."

The silence in which Morgan received his fond sophistry struck Pemberton
somehow as expressive. After a moment the child repeated: "You are a
hero!" Then he added: "They leave me with you altogether. You've all
the responsibility. They put me off on you from morning till night. Why
then should they object to my taking up with you completely? I'd help
you."

"They're not particularly keen about my being helped, and they delight in
thinking of you as _theirs_. They're tremendously proud of you."

"I'm not proud of _them_. But you know that," Morgan returned.

"Except for the little matter we speak of they're charming people," said
Pemberton, not taking up the point made for his intelligence, but
wondering greatly at the boy's own, and especially at this fresh reminder
of something he had been conscious of from the first--the strangest thing
in his friend's large little composition, a temper, a sensibility, even a
private ideal, which made him as privately disown the stuff his people
were made of. Morgan had in secret a small loftiness which made him
acute about betrayed meanness; as well as a critical sense for the
manners immediately surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a
juvenile nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this
nature "old-fashioned," as the word is of children--quaint or wizened or
offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had paid the
penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in his family.
This comparison didn't make him vain, but it could make him melancholy
and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things,
shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a
scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows
that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure to himself
the morning twilight of childhood, so as to deal with it safely, he saw
it was never fixed, never arrested, that ignorance, at the instant he
touched it, was already flushing faintly into knowledge, that there was
nothing that at a given moment you could say an intelligent