He, who had been a man of action all his life, had not perceived how it would grow to be matter of common instinct that to act was to commit oneself, and that, while what one had was not precisely what one wanted, what one had not (if one had it) would be as bad.

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.