2004 FRQ #2

            The poor young man hesitated and procrastinated: 

        it cost him such an effort to broach the subject of 

        terms, to speak of money to a person who spoke only 

        of feelings and, as it were, of the aristocracy. Yet he 

5      was unwilling to take leave, treating his engagement 

        as settled, without some more conventional glance in 

        that direction than he could find an opening for in the 

        manner of the large, affable lady who sat there 

        drawing a pair of soiled gants de Suède* through a 

10    fat, jewelled hand and, at once pressing and gliding, 

        repeated over and over everything but the thing he 

        would have liked to hear. He would have liked to hear 

        the figure of his salary; but just as he was nervously

        about to sound that note the little boy came back— the

15    little boy Mrs. Moreen had sent out of the room to 

        fetch her fan. He came back without the fan, only 

        with the casual observation that he couldn’t find it. As 

        he dropped this cynical confession he looked straight 

        and hard at the candidate for the honour of taking his 

20    education in hand. This personage reflected, some-

        what grimly, that the first thing he should have to 

        teach his little charge would be to appear to address 

        himself to his mother when he spoke to her —

        especially not to make her such an improper answer 

25    as that. 

            When Mrs. Moreen bethought herself of this 

        pretext for getting rid of their companion, Pemberton 

        supposed it was precisely to approach the delicate 

        subject of his remuneration. But it had been only to 

30    say some things about her son which it was better that 

        a boy of eleven shouldn’t catch. They were 

        extravagantly to his advantage, save when she 

        lowered her voice to sigh, tapping her left side 

        familiarly: “And all over-clouded by this, you 

35    know — all at the mercy of a weakness — !” 

        Pemberton gathered that the weakness was in the 

        region of the heart. He had known the poor child was 

        not robust: this was the basis on which he had been 

        invited to treat, through an English lady, an Oxford 

40    acquaintance, then at Nice, who happened to know 

        both his needs and those of the amiable American 

        family looking out for something really superior in 

        the way of a resident tutor. 

            The young man’s impression of his prospective 

45    pupil, who had first come into the room, as if to see 

        for himself, as soon as Pemberton was admitted, was 

        not quite the soft solicitation the visitor had taken for 

        granted. Morgan Moreen was, somehow, sickly 

        without being delicate, and that he looked intelligent 

50    (it is true Pemberton wouldn’t have enjoyed his being 

        stupid), only added to the suggestion that, as with his 

        big mouth and big ears he really couldn’t be called 

        pretty, he might be unpleasant. Pemberton was 

        modest — he was even timid; and the chance that his 

55    small scholar might prove cleverer than himself had 

        quite figured, to his nervousness, among the dangers 

        of an untried experiment. 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 

60    yet one’s University honours had, pecuniarily 

        speaking, remained barren. At any rate, when Mrs. 

        Moreen got up as if 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 

65    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, if the allusion did not 

        sound rather vulgar. This was exactly because she 

70    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, 

75    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, là-là!”