His mother would consume any amount, and his father would consume
even more than his mother. He had a theory that Ulick had wriggled 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 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.
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