t made
his queer delicacies manly--to carry themselves with an air. But their
one idea was to get in with people who didn't want them and to take snubs
as it they were honourable scars. Why people didn't want them more he
didn't know--that was people's own affair; after all they weren't
superficially repulsive, they were a hundred times cleverer than most of
the dreary grandees, the "poor swells" they rushed about Europe to catch
up with. "After all they _are_ amusing--they are!" he used to pronounce
with the wisdom of the ages. To which Pemberton always replied:
"Amusing--the great Moreen troupe? Why they're altogether delightful;
and if it weren't for the hitch that you and I (feeble performers!) make
in the ensemble they'd carry everything before them."

What the boy couldn't get over was the fact that this particular blight
seemed, in a tradition of self-respect, so undeserved and so arbitrary.
No doubt people had a right to take the line they liked; but why should
his people have liked the line of pushing and toadying and lying and
cheating? What had their forefathers--all decent folk, so far as he
knew--done to them, or what had he done to them? Who had poisoned their
blood with the fifth-rate social ideal, the fixed idea of making smart
acquaintances and getting into the monde chic, especially when it was
foredoomed to failure and exposure? They showed so what they were after;
that was what made the people they wanted not want _them_. And never a
wince for dignity, never a throb of shame at looking each other in the
face, never any independence or resentment or disgust. If his father or
his brother would only knock some one down once or twice a year! Clever
as they were they never guessed the impression they made. They were good-
natured, yes--as good-natured as Jews at the doors of clothing-shops! But
was that the model one wanted one's family to follow? Morgan had dim
memories of an old grandfather, the maternal, in New York, whom he had
been taken across the ocean at the age of five to see: a gentleman with a
high neck-cloth and a good deal of pronunciation, who wore a dress-coat
in the morning, which made one wonder what he wore in the evening, and
had, or was supposed to have "property" and something to do with the
Bible Society. It couldn't have been but that he was a good type.
Pemberton himself remembered Mrs. Clancy, a widowed sister of Mr.
Moreen's, who was as irritating as a moral tale an