episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland.  Their supreme quaintness was their success—­as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure.  Wasn’t it success to have kept him so hatefully long?  Wasn’t it success to have drawn him in that first morning at dejeuner, the Friday he came—­it was enough to make one superstitious—­so that he utterly committed himself, and this not by calculation or on a signal, but from a happy instinct which made them, like a band of gipsies, work so neatly together?  They amused him as much as if they had really been a band of gipsies.  He was still young and had not seen much of the world—­his English years had been properly arid; therefore the reversed conventions of the Moreens—­for they had their desperate proprieties—­struck him as topsy-turvy.  He had encountered nothing like them at Oxford; still less had any such note been struck to his younger American ear during the four years at Yale in which he had richly supposed himself to be reacting against a Puritan strain.  The reaction of the Moreens, at any rate, went ever so much further.  He had thought himself very sharp that first day in hitting them all off in his mind with the “cosmopolite” label.  Later it seemed feeble and colourless—­confessedly helplessly provisional.

He yet when he first applied it felt a glow of joy—­for an instructor he was still empirical—­rise from the apprehension that living with them would really he to see life.  Their sociable strangeness was an intimation of that—­their chatter of tongues, their gaiety and good humour, their infinite dawdling (they were always getting themselves up, but it took forever, and Pemberton had once found Mr. Moreen shaving in the drawing-room), their French, their Italian and, cropping up in the foreign fluencies, their cold tough slices of American.  They lived on macaroni and coffee—­they had these articles prepared in perfection—­but they knew recipes for a hundred other dishes.  They overflowed with music and song, were always humming and catching each other up, and had a sort of professional acquaintance with Continental cities.  They talked of “good places” as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players.  They had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to official parties.  They were a perfect calendar of the “days” of their friends, which Pemberton knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out of bed to go to, and which made the week larger than life when Mrs. Moreen talked of them with Paula and Amy.  Their initiations gave their new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture.  Mrs. Moreen had translated something at some former period—­an author whom it made Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of.  They could imitate Venetian and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some patois of one of their countries, but which he “caught on to” as he would not have grasped provincial development of Spanish or German.