This compendium summarizes the opening eight chapters of a novel concerning the young English tutor Pemberton and his uneasy attachment to the Moreen household and, above all, to its son Morgan.

Pemberton, recently impoverished after a year abroad, is engaged as a private tutor by Mrs. Moreen to instruct her ailing boy. The family are cosmopolitan, theatrical, socially ambitious Americans who alternate between continental affluence and penury; their manners are picturesque but morally ambiguous. Mrs. and Mr. Moreen cultivate the appearance of cultivated, genteel life—French and Italian phrases, musical evenings, acquaintances of vague rank—while practising thrift, theatrical hospitality and frequent evasions about money. Their elder children, Ulick, Paula and Amy, participate in the family performance of social climbing; Morgan, the younger son, is small, pale, precocious and intermittently frail, with a shrewdness and private dignity that constantly rebukes his parents’ vanity and meanness.

From the outset financial and ethical tensions complicate the tutor–family relationship. Pemberton hesitates to press for clear terms; the Moreens give ambiguous assurances and occasional payments, exploiting his diffidence. Morgan, unusually perceptive for his age, recognizes the household economy and the pattern of exploiting dependents—an insight traced back, he says, to the nurse Zénobie, who left when unpaid. His sympathy for Pemberton and his contempt for his parents’ toadying create a close, conspiratorial bond between pupil and tutor.

Pemberton oscillates between professional prudence and personal attachment. He sometimes seeks paid work elsewhere—accepting a brief engagement with an “opulent youth” in England—but repeatedly returns when told Morgan is ill. The Moreens manipulate these crises to keep him, alternating appeals to sentiment with small monetary concessions. Mrs. Moreen’s theatrical generosity and culpable coquettishness with money both secure and strain Pemberton’s loyalty.

Episodes in Nice, Paris and Venice illustrate the family’s alternating gaiety and collapse: improvised moves, hotel shifts, attempts at fashionable connections (the Dorringtons, princes, Mr. Granger) and a final public exposure of ruin. The household’s instability culminates in a moment when, pressed by creditors and obliged to disperse, the parents implore Pemberton to remove Morgan and care for him “for ever.” That sudden consecration of trust is immediately followed by a catastrophic physical crisis: Morgan, overwhelmed by emotion, collapses with a fatal-seeming attack of his long-weak heart, leaving the relationships, obligations and moral compromises of the preceding months tragically unresolved.