It was strange how they contrived to reconcile the
appearance, and indeed the essential fact, of adoring the child with
their eagerness to wash their hands of him. Did they want to get rid of
him before he should find them out? Pemberton was finding them out month
by month. The boy's fond family, however this might be, turned their
backs with exaggerated delicacy, as if to avoid the reproach of
interfering. Seeing in time how little he had in common with them--it
was by _them_ he first observed it; they proclaimed it with complete
humility--his companion was moved to speculate on the mysteries of
transmission, the far jumps of heredity. Where his detachment from most
of the things they represented had come from was more than an observer
could say--it certainly had burrowed under two or three generations.
As for Pemberton's own estimate of his pupil, it was a good while before
he got the point of view, so little had he been prepared for it by the
smug young barbarians to whom the tradition of tutorship, as hitherto
revealed to him, had been adjusted.
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