The Pupil

The Pupil

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Pupil, by Henry James
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Title: The Pupil
Author: Henry James
Release Date: March 25, 2005 [eBook #1032]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
PUPIL***

Transcribed from the 1916 Le Roy Phillips edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

THE PUPIL

CHAPTER I
The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: it cost him such an
effort to broach the subject of terms, to speak of money to a person who
spoke only of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he was
unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement as settled, without
some more conventional glance in that direction than he could find an
opening for in the manner of the large affable lady who sat there
drawing a pair of soiled gants de Suede through a fat jewelled hand and,
at once pressing and gliding, repeated over and over everything but the
thing he would have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear the

figure of his salary; but just as he was nervously about to sound that
note the little boy came back--the little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out
of the room to fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only with
the casual observation that he couldn't find it. As he dropped this
cynical confession he looked straight and hard at the candidate for the
honour of taking his education in hand. This personage reflected
somewhat grimly that the thing he should have to teach his little charge
would be to appear to address himself to his mother when he spoke to
her--especially not to make her such an improper answer as that.
When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this pretext for getting rid of
their companion Pemberton supposed it was precisely to approach the
delicate subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to say some
things about her son that it was better a boy of eleven shouldn't catch.
They were extravagantly to his advantage save when she lowered her
voice to sigh, tapping her left side familiarly, "And all overclouded by
this, you know; all at the mercy of a weakness--!" Pemberton gathered
that the weakness was in the region of the heart. He had known the
poor child was not robust: this was the basis on which he had been
invited to treat, through an English lady, an Oxford acquaintance, then
at Nice, who happened to know both his needs and those of the amiable
American family looking out for something really superior in the way
of a resident tutor.
The young man's impression of his prospective pupil, who had come
into the room as if to see for himself the moment Pemberton was
admitted, was not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for
granted. Morgan Moreen was somehow sickly without being "delicate,"
and that he looked intelligent--it is true Pemberton wouldn't have
enjoyed his being stupid--only added to the suggestion that, as with his
big mouth and big ears he really couldn't be called pretty, he might too
utterly fail to please. Pemberton was modest, was even timid; and the
chance that his small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had
quite figured, to his anxiety, among the dangers of an untried
experiment. He reflected, however, that these were risks one had to run
when one accepted a position, as it was called, in a private family;
when as yet one's university honours had, pecuniarily speaking,

remained barren. At any rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate
that, since it was understood he would enter upon his duties within the
week she would let him off now, he succeeded, in spite of the presence
of the child, in squeezing out a phrase about the rate of payment. It was
not the fault of the conscious smile which seemed a reference to the
lady's expensive identity, it was not the fault of this demonstration,
which had, in a sort, both vagueness and point, if the allusion didn't
sound rather vulgar. This was exactly because she became still more
gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you that all that will be quite
regular."
Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that" was
to amount to--people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's words,
however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to
elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the