At the same time, if he had supposed
his threat would do something towards bringing them round, he was
disappointed to find them taking for granted--how vulgar their perception
_had_ been!--that he had already given them away. There was a mystic
uneasiness in their parental breasts, and that had been the inferior
sense of it. None the less however, his threat did touch them; for if
they had escaped it was only to meet a new danger. Mr. Moreen appealed
to him, on every precedent, as a man of the world; but his wife had
recourse, for the first time since his domestication with them, to a fine
hauteur, reminding him that a devoted mother, with her child, had arts
that protected her against gross misrepresentation.

"I should misrepresent you grossly if I accused you of common honesty!"
our friend replied; but as he closed the door behind him sharply,
thinking he had not done himself much good, while Mr. Moreen lighted
another cigarette, he heard his hostess shout after him more touchingly:

"Oh you do, you _do_, put the knife to one's throat!"

The next morning, very early, she came to his room. He recognised her
knock, but had no hope she brought him money; as to which he was wrong,
for she had fifty francs in her hand. She squeezed forward in her
dressing-gown, and he received her in his own, between his bath-tub and
his bed. He had been tolerably schooled by this time to the "foreign
ways" of his hosts. Mrs. Moreen was ardent, and when she was ardent she
didn't care what she did; so she now sat down on his bed, his clothes
being on the chairs, and, in her preoccupation, forgot, as she glanced
round, to be ashamed of giving him such a horrid room. What Mrs.
Moreen's ardour now bore upon was the design of persuading him that in
the first place she was very good-natured to bring him fifty francs, and
that in the second, if he would only see it, he was really too absurd to
expect to be paid. Wasn't he paid enough without perpetual money--wasn't
he paid by the comfortable luxurious home he enjoyed with them all,
without a care, an anxiety, a solitary want? Wasn't he sure of his
position, and wasn't that everything to a young man like him, quite
unknown, with singularly little to show, the ground of whose exorbitant
pretensions it had never been easy to discover? Wasn't he paid above all
by the sweet relation he had established with Morgan--quite ideal as from
master to pupil--and by the simple privilege of knowi