He had never been self-conscious--it
was not the custom of his generation--and, having but little
imagination, had never suspected that he was laying up that quality
for his descendants, together with a competence which secured them a
comfortable leisure.
Of all the persons in his grand-daughter's studio that afternoon, that
stray sheep Mr. Purcey would have been, perhaps, the only one whose
judgments he would have considered sound. No one had laid up a
competence for Mr. Purcey, who had been in business from the age of
twenty.
It is uncertain whether the mere fact that he was not in his own fold
kept this visitor lingering in the studio when all other guests were
gone; or whether it was simply the feeling that the longer he stayed
in contact with really artistic people the more distinguished he was
becoming. Probably the latter, for the possession of that Harpignies,
a good specimen, which he had bought by accident, and subsequently by
accident discovered to have a peculiar value, had become a factor in his
life, marking him out from all his friends, who went in more for a neat
type of Royal Academy landscape, together with reproductions of young
ladies in eighteenth-century costumes seated on horseback, or in Scotch
gardens. A junior partner in a banking-house of some importance, he
lived at Wimbledon, whence he passed up and down daily in his car.
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