Morgan was dear to his mother, but he never was better dressed than was absolutely necessary—­partly, no doubt, by his own fault, for he was as indifferent to his appearance as a German philosopher.  “My dear fellow, you are coming to pieces,” Pemberton would say to him in sceptical remonstrance; to which the child would reply, looking at him serenely up and down:  “My dear fellow, so are you!  I don’t want to cast you in the shade.”  Pemberton could have no rejoinder for this—­the assertion so closely represented the fact.  If however the deficiencies of his own wardrobe were a chapter by themselves he didn’t like his little charge to look too poor.  Later he used to say “Well, if we’re poor, why, after all, shouldn’t we look it?” and he consoled himself with thinking there was something rather elderly and gentlemanly in Morgan’s disrepair—­it differed from the untidiness of the urchin who plays and spoils his things.  He could trace perfectly the degrees by which, in proportion as her little son confined himself to his tutor for society, Mrs. Moreen shrewdly forbore to renew his garments.  She did nothing that didn’t show, neglected him because he escaped notice, and then, as he illustrated this clever policy, discouraged at home his public appearances.  Her position was logical enough—­those members of her family who did show had to be showy.

During this period and several others Pemberton was quite aware of how he and his comrade might strike people; wandering languidly through the Jardin des Plantes as if they had nowhere to go, sitting on the winter days in the galleries of the Louvre, so splendidly ironical to the homeless, as if for the advantage of the calorifere.  They joked about it sometimes:  it was the sort of joke that was perfectly within the boy’s compass.  They figured themselves as part of the vast vague hand-to-mouth multitude of the enormous city and pretended they were proud of their position in it—­it showed them “such a lot of life” and made them conscious of a democratic brotherhood.  If Pemberton couldn’t feel a sympathy in destitution with his small companion—­for after all Morgan’s fond parents would never have let him really suffer—­the boy would at least feel it with him, so it came to the same thing.  He used sometimes to wonder what people would think they were—­to fancy they were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping.  Morgan wouldn’t be taken for a young patrician with a preceptor—­he wasn’t smart enough; though he might pass for his companion’s sickly little brother.  Now and then he had a five-franc piece, and except once, when they bought a couple of lovely neckties, one of which he made Pemberton accept, they laid it out scientifically in old books.  This was sure to be a great day, always spent on the quays, in a rummage of the dusty boxes that garnish the parapets.  Such occasions helped them to live, for their books ran low very soon after the beginning of their acquaintance.  Pemberton had a good many in England, but he was obliged to write to a friend and ask him kindly to get some fellow to give him something for them.