The Pupil | Page 2

mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh la-la!"
Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to
the window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in
his elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play. The young man
wondered if he should be able to teach him to play, though his mother
had said it would never do and that this was why school was impossible.
Mrs. Moreen exhibited no discomfiture; she only continued blandly:
"Mr. Moreen will be delighted to meet your wishes. As I told you, he
has been called to London for a week. As soon as he comes back you
shall have it out with him."
This was so frank and friendly that the young man could only reply,
laughing as his hostess laughed: "Oh I don't imagine we shall have
much of a battle."
"They'll give you anything you like," the boy remarked unexpectedly,
returning from the window. "We don't mind what anything costs--we
live awfully well."
"My darling, you're too quaint!" his mother exclaimed, putting out to
caress him a practised but ineffectual hand. He slipped out of it, but
looked with intelligent innocent eyes at Pemberton, who had already

had time to notice that from one moment to the other his small satiric
face seemed to change its time of life. At this moment it was infantine,
yet it appeared also to be under the influence of curious intuitions and
knowledges. Pemberton rather disliked precocity and was disappointed
to find gleams of it in a disciple not yet in his teens. Nevertheless he
divined on the spot that Morgan wouldn't prove a bore. He would prove
on the contrary a source of agitation. This idea held the young man, in
spite of a certain repulsion.
"You pompous little person! We're not extravagant!" Mrs. Moreen
gaily protested, making another unsuccessful attempt to draw the boy
to her side. "You must know what to expect," she went on to
Pemberton.
"The less you expect the better!" her companion interposed. "But we
are people of fashion."
"Only so far as you make us so!" Mrs. Moreen tenderly mocked. "Well
then, on Friday--don't tell me you're superstitious--and mind you don't
fail us. Then you'll see us all. I'm so sorry the girls are out. I guess
you'll like the girls. And, you know, I've another son, quite different
from this one."
"He tries to imitate me," Morgan said to their friend.
"He tries? Why he's twenty years old!" cried Mrs. Moreen.
"You're very witty," Pemberton remarked to the child--a proposition his
mother echoed with enthusiasm, declaring Morgan's sallies to be the
delight of the house.
The boy paid no heed to this; he only enquired abruptly of the visitor,
who was surprised afterwards that he hadn't struck him as offensively
forward: "Do you want very much to come?"
"Can you doubt it after such a description of what I shall hear?"
Pemberton replied. Yet he didn't want to come at all; he was coming
because he had to go somewhere, thanks to the collapse of his fortune

at the end of a year abroad spent on the system of putting his scant
patrimony into a single full wave of experience. He had had his full
wave but couldn't pay the score at his inn. Moreover he had caught in
the boy's eyes the glimpse of a far-off appeal.
"Well, I'll do the best I can for you," said Morgan; with which he
turned away again. He passed out of one of the long windows;
Pemberton saw him go and lean on the parapet of the terrace. He
remained there while the young man took leave of his mother, who, on
Pemberton's looking as if he expected a farewell from him, interposed
with: "Leave him, leave him; he's so strange!" Pemberton supposed her
to fear something he might say. "He's a genius--you'll love him," she
added. "He's much the most interesting person in the family." And
before he could invent some civility to oppose to this she wound up
with: "But we're all good, you know!"
"He's a genius--you'll love him!" were words that recurred to our
aspirant before the Friday, suggesting among many things that geniuses
were not invariably loveable. However, it was all the better if there was
an element that would make tutorship absorbing: he had perhaps taken
too much for granted it would only disgust him. As he left the villa
after his interview he looked up at the balcony and saw the child
leaning over it. "We shall have great larks!" he called up.
Morgan hung fire a moment and then gaily returned: "By the time you
come back I shall have thought of something witty!"
This made Pemberton say to himself "After all he's rather nice."

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