another cigarette, he heard his hostess shout after him more touchingly:

"Oh you do, you _do_, put the knife to one's throat!"

The next morning, very early, she came to his room. He recognised her
knock, but had no hope she brought him money; as to which he was wrong,
for she had fifty francs in her hand. She squeezed forward in her
dressing-gown, and he received her in his own, between his bath-tub and
his bed. He had been tolerably schooled by this time to the "foreign
ways" of his hosts. Mrs. Moreen was ardent, and when she was ardent she
didn't care what she did; so she now sat down on his bed, his clothes
being on the chairs, and, in her preoccupation, forgot, as she glanced
round, to be ashamed of giving him such a horrid room. What Mrs.
Moreen's ardour now bore upon was the design of persuading him that in
the first place she was very good-natured to bring him fifty francs, and
that in the second, if he would only see it, he was really too absurd to
expect to be paid. Wasn't he paid enough without perpetual money--wasn't
he paid by the comfortable luxurious home he enjoyed with them all,
without a care, an anxiety, a solitary want? Wasn't he sure of his
position, and wasn't that everything to a young man like him, quite
unknown, with singularly little to show, the ground of whose exorbitant
pretensions it had never been easy to discover? Wasn't he paid above all
by the sweet relation he had established with Morgan--quite ideal as from
master to pupil--and by the simple privilege of knowing and living with
so amazingly gifted a child; than whom really (and she meant literally
what she said) there was no better company in Europe? Mrs. Moreen
herself took to appealing to him as a man of the world; she said "Voyons,
mon cher," and "My dear man, look here now"; and urged him to be
reasonable, putting it before him that it was truly a chance for him. She
spoke as if, according as he _should_ be reasonable, he would prove