Chapter 8

When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand
for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant had really
such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten of his own long
association with an intensely living little mind. From Morgan he heard
half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming young letters, a patchwork of
tongues, with indulgent postscripts in the family Volapuk and, in little
squares and rounds and crannies of the text, the drollest
illustrations--letters that he was divided between the impulse to show
his present charge as a vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of
something in them that publicity would profane. The opulent youth went
up in due course and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the
presumption that brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his
parents, condoning the lapse, which they good-naturedly treated as little
as possible as if it were Pemberton's, should have sounded the rally
again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.

The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three louis,
and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger amount. In return
for this favour he received a frantic scribbled line from her: "Implore
you to come back instantly--Morgan dread fully ill." They were on there
rebound, once more in Paris--often as Pemberton had seen them depressed
he had never seen them crushed--and communication was therefore rapid. He
wrote to the boy to ascertain the state of his health, but awaited the
answer in vain. He accordingly, after three days, took an abrupt leave
of the opulent youth and, crossing the Channel, alighted at the small
hotel, in the quarter of the Champs Elysees, of which Mrs. Moreen had
given him the address. A deep if dumb dissatisfaction with this lady and
her companions bore him company: they couldn't be vulgarly honest, but
they could live at hotels, in velvety entresols, amid a smell of burnt
pastilles, surrounded by the most expensive city in Europe. When he had
left them in Venice it was with an irrepressible suspicion that something
was going to happen; but the only thing that could have taken place was
again their masterly retreat. "How is he? where is he?" he asked of Mrs.
Moreen; but before she could speak these questions were answered by the
pressure round hid neck of a pair of arms, in shrunken sleeves, which
still were perfectly capable of an effusive young foreign squeeze.

"Dreadfully ill--I don't see it!" the young man cried. And then to
Morgan: "Why on earth didn't you relieve me? Why didn't you answer my
letter?"

Mrs. Moreen declared that when she wrote he was very bad, and Pemberton
learned at the same time from