Chapter 7

They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the first
consequences of their doing so was that Pemberton stuck it out, in his
friend's parlance, for the purpose. Morgan made the facts so vivid and
so droll, and at the same time so bald and so ugly, that there was
fascination in talking them over with him, just as there would have been
heartlessness in leaving him alone with them. Now that the pair had such
perceptions in common it was useless for them to pretend they didn't
judge such people; but the very judgement and the exchange of perceptions
created another tie. Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he
himself was made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences. What
came out in it most was the small fine passion of his pride. He had
plenty of that, Pemberton felt--so much that one might perhaps wisely
wish for it some early bruises. He would have liked his people to have a
spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually eating humble-
pie. His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume
even more than his mother. He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled out
of an "affair" at Nice: there had once been a flurry at home, a regular
panic, after which they all went to bed and took medicine, not to be
accounted for on any other supposition. Morgan had a romantic
imagination, led by poetry and history, and he would have liked those who
"bore his name"--as he used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made
his queer delicacies manly--to carry themselves with an air. But their
one idea was to get in with people who didn't want them and to take snubs
as it they were honourable scars. Why people didn't want them more he
didn't know--that was people's own affair; after all they weren't
superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times cleverer than most of
the dreary grandees, the "poor swells" they rushed about Europe to catch
up with. "After all they _are_ amusing--they are!" he used to pronounce
with the wisdom of the ages. To which Pemberton always replied:
"Amusing--the great Moreen troupe? Why they're altogether delightful;
and if it weren't for the hitch that you and I (feeble performers!) make
in the ensemble they'd carry everything before them."

What the boy couldn't get over was the fact that this particular blight
seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so arbitrary.
No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should
his people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and
cheating? What had their forefathers--all decent folk, so far as he
knew--done to them, or what had he done to them? Who had poisoned their
blood with the fifth-rate social ideal, the