“It’s the family language—­Ultramoreen,” Morgan explained to him drolly enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself, though he dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little prelate.

Among all the “days” with which Mrs. Moreen’s memory was taxed she managed to squeeze in one of her own, which her friends sometimes forgot.  But the house drew a frequented air from the number of fine people who were freely named there and from several mysterious men with foreign titles and English clothes whom Morgan called the princes and who, on sofas with the girls, talked French very loud—­though sometimes with some oddity of accent—­as if to show they were saying nothing improper.  Pemberton wondered how the princes could ever propose in that tone and so publicly:  he took for granted cynically that this was what was desired of them.  Then he recognised that even for the chance of such an advantage Mrs. Moreen would never allow Paula and Amy to receive alone.  These young ladies were not at all timid, but it was just the safeguards that made them so candidly free.  It was a houseful of Bohemians who wanted tremendously to be Philistines.

In one respect, however, certainly they achieved no rigour—­they were wonderfully amiable and ecstatic about Morgan.  It was a genuine tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each.  They even praised his beauty, which was small, and were as afraid of him as if they felt him of finer clay.  They spoke of him as a little angel and a prodigy—­they touched on his want of health with long vague faces.  Pemberton feared at first an extravagance that might make him hate the boy, but before this happened he had become extravagant himself.  Later, when he had grown rather to hate the others, it was a bribe to patience for him that they were at any rate nice about Morgan, going on tiptoe if they fancied he was showing symptoms, and even giving up somebody’s “day” to procure him a pleasure.  Mixed with this too was the oddest wish to make him independent, as if they had felt themselves not good enough for him.  They passed him over to the new members of their circle very much as if wishing to force some charity of adoption on so free an agent and get rid of their own charge.  They were delighted when they saw Morgan take so to his kind playfellow, and could think of no higher praise for the young man.  It was strange how they contrived to reconcile the appearance, and indeed the essential fact, of adoring the child with their eagerness to wash their hands of him.  Did they want to get rid of him before he should find them out?  Pemberton was finding them out month by month.  The boy’s fond family, however this might be, turned their backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of interfering.  Seeing in time how little he had in common with them—­it was by them he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete humility—­his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of transmission, the far jumps of heredity.  Where his detachment from most of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer could say—­it certainly had burrowed under two or three generations.