ere 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.

As for Pemberton's own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before
he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the
smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto
revealed to him, had been adjusted. Morgan was scrappy and surprising,
deficient in many properties supposed common to the genus and abounding
in others that were the portion only of the supernaturally clever. One
day his friend made a great stride: it cleared up the question to
perceive that Morgan _was_ supernaturally clever and that, though the
formula was temporarily meagre, this would be the only assumption on
which one could successfully deal with him. He had the general quality
of a child for whom life had not been simplified by school, a kind of
homebred sensibility which might have been as bad for himself but was
charming for others, and a whole range of refinement and
perception--little musical vibrations as taking as picked-up
airs--begotten by wandering about Europe at the tail of his migratory
tribe. This might not have been