He reflected,
however, that these were risks one had to run when one accepted a
position, as it was called, in a private family; when as yet one's
university honours had, pecuniarily speaking, remained barren. At any
rate when Mrs. Moreen got up as to intimate that, since it was understood
he would enter upon his duties within the week she would let him off now,
he succeeded, in spite of the presence of the child, in squeezing out a
phrase about the rate of payment. It was not the fault of the conscious
smile which seemed a reference to the lady's expensive identity, it was
not the fault of this demonstration, which had, in a sort, both vagueness
and point, if the allusion didn't sound rather vulgar. This was exactly
because she became still more gracious to reply: "Oh I can assure you
that all that will be quite regular."
Pemberton only wondered, while he took up his hat, what "all that" was to
amount to--people had such different ideas. Mrs. Moreen's words,
however, seemed to commit the family to a pledge definite enough to
elicit from the child a strange little comment in the shape of the
mocking foreign ejaculation "Oh la-la!"
Pemberton, in some confusion, glanced at him as he walked slowly to the
window with his back turned, his hands in his pockets and the air in his
elderly shoulders of a boy who didn't play.
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