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