an's way, but had made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a
monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied
with the iniquities of her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs.
Peniston and learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the
kitchen-maid's smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a
kind of impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded
with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their annual
reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties were manifold,
for they extended from furtive inspections of the servants' bedrooms to
unannounced descents to the cellar; but she had never allowed herself
many pleasures. Once, however, she had had a special edition of the Sarum
Rule printed in rubric and presented to every clergyman in the diocese;
and the gilt album in which their letters of thanks were pasted formed
the chief ornament of her drawing-room table.

Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a woman
was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion had been
grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious, with the result
that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs. Gryce to extract his
promise about the overshoes, so little likely was he to hazard himself
abroad in the rain. After attaining his majority, and coming into the
fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had made out of a patent device for
excluding fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his
mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large
property passed into her son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she
called his "interests" demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly
installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose sense of
duty was not inferior to his mother's, spent all his week days in the
handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men on small salaries
had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was
initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of
accumulation.

As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce's only
occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not too hard
a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such low diet. At
any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of the situation that
she yielded to a sense of security in which all fear of Mr. Rosedale, a