They talked of
"good places" as if they had been pickpockets or strolling players. They
had at Nice a villa, a carriage, a piano and a banjo, and they went to
official parties. They were a perfect calendar of the "days" of their
friends, which Pemberton knew them, when they were indisposed, to get out
of bed to go to, and which made the week larger than life when Mrs.
Moreen talked of them with Paula and Amy. Their initiations gave their
new inmate at first an almost dazzling sense of culture. Mrs. Moreen had
translated something at some former period--an author whom it made
Pemberton feel borne never to have heard of. They could imitate Venetian
and sing Neapolitan, and when they wanted to say something very
particular communicated with each other in an ingenious dialect of their
own, an elastic spoken cipher which Pemberton at first took for some
patois of one of their countries, but which he "caught on to" as he would
not have grasped provincial development of Spanish or German.
"It's the family language--Ultramoreen," Morgan explained to him drolly
enough; but the boy rarely condescended to use it himself, though he
dealt in colloquial Latin as if he had been a little prelate.
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