They looked at the facts a good deal after this and one of the first consequences of their doing so was that Pemberton stuck it out, in his friend’s parlance¹, for the purpose. Morgan made the facts so vivid and so droll², and at the same time so bald and so ugly, that there was fascination³ in talking them over with him, just as there would have been heartlessness in leaving him alone with them. Now that the pair had such perceptions in common it was useless for them to pretend they didn’t judge such people; but the very judgement and the exchange of perceptions created another tie. Morgan had never been so interesting as now that he himself was made plainer by the sidelight of these confidences. What came out in it most was the small fine passion of his pride. He had plenty of that, Pemberton felt — so much that one might perhaps wisely wish for it some early bruises⁴. He would have liked his people to have a spirit and had waked up to the sense of their perpetually eating humble-pie. His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume even more than his mother. He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled⁵ out of an “affair” at Nice: there had once been a flurry at home, a regular panic, after which they all went to bed and took medicine, not to be accounted for on any other supposition. Morgan had a romantic imagination, led by poetry and history, and he would have liked those who “bore his name” — as he used to say to Pemberton with the humour that made his queer delicacies⁶ manly⁷ — 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 honourable⁸ scars. Why people didn’t want them more he didn’t know — that was people’s own affair; after all they weren’t superficially

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