" She repeated this in substance now. "Of course you're a
gentleman--that's a bother the less!" Pemberton reminded her that he had
not "dragged in" anything that wasn't already in as much as his foot was
in his shoe; and she also repeated her prayer that, somewhere and
somehow, he would find her sixty francs. He took the liberty of hinting
that if he could find them it wouldn't be to lend them to _her_--as to
which he consciously did himself injustice, knowing that if he had them
he would certainly put them at her disposal. He accused himself, at
bottom and not unveraciously, of a fantastic, a demoralised sympathy with
her. If misery made strange bedfellows it also made strange sympathies.
It was moreover a part of the abasement of living with such people that
one had to make vulgar retorts, quite out of one's own tradition of good
manners. "Morgan, Morgan, to what pass have I come for you?" he groaned
while Mrs. Moreen floated voluminously down the sala again to liberate
the boy, wailing as she went that everything was too odious.
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