第15章

"Dear lady, c'est trop fort!" Pemberton laughed in the manner and with the borrowed grace of idiom that marked the best colloquial, the best anecdotic, moments of his friends themselves."Where in the world do you suppose I should get three louis, du train dont vous allez?""I thought you worked - wrote things.Don't they pay you?""Not a penny."

"Are you such a fool as to work for nothing?""You ought surely to know that."

Mrs.Moreen stared, then she coloured a little.Pemberton saw she had quite forgotten the terms - if "terms" they could be called -that he had ended by accepting from herself; they had burdened her memory as little as her conscience."Oh yes, I see what you mean -you've been very nice about that; but why drag it in so often?"She had been perfectly urbane with him ever since the rough scene of explanation in his room the morning he made her accept HIS"terms" - the necessity of his making his case known to Morgan.

She had felt no resentment after seeing there was no danger Morgan would take the matter up with her.Indeed, attributing this immunity to the good taste of his influence with the boy, she had once said to Pemberton "My dear fellow, it's an immense comfort you're a gentleman." She repeated this in substance now."Of course you're a gentleman - that's a bother the less!" Pemberton reminded her that he had not "dragged in" anything that wasn't already in as much as his foot was in his shoe; and she also repeated her prayer that, somewhere and somehow, he would find her sixty francs.He took the liberty of hinting that if he could find them it wouldn't be to lend them to HER - as to which he consciously did himself injustice, knowing that if he had them he would certainly put them at her disposal.He accused himself, at bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralised sympathy with her.If misery made strange bedfellows it also made strange sympathies.It was moreover a part of the abasement of living with such people that one had to make vulgar retorts, quite out of one's own tradition of good manners."Morgan, Morgan, to what pass have I come for you?" he groaned while Mrs.Moreen floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate the boy, wailing as she went that everything was too odious.