ith
blue ribbon, had met at their first children's party. Walter Grierson,
the eldest of the family, now a City solicitor, had been eleven at that
time, whilst May had been seven and Ida five; but Jimmy had not arrived
until three summers later.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Grierson belonged to eminently solid families, whose
forebears for generations had looked to the City for their living. To
them, the Square Mile stood for Respectability, just as the West End
typified Laxity and Luxury; whilst outside these limits there was
nothing but the Lower Classes. They ignored the Underworld, possibly
because they knew nothing of it, more likely because it had no place in
their Scheme of Things, the two main articles of their creed being that
every man must choose an occupation early and abide by his choice, and
that every good woman must stay at home. The logical result of these
Grierson ancestors and their kind was the Victorian age, the exaltation
of the Supremely Bad in Art and the Supremely Proper in mankind. Mrs.
Grierson had been Victorian in the fullest sense of the word, and she
had lived and died with all her principles intact, believing in the
Evangelical Church, the respectability of wealth, and the evil
tendencies of modern thought. On the other hand, some alien strain had
crept into Mr. Grierson, and he had not accepted the family traditions
in their entirety; in fact, both his own relatives and those of his wife
had found much to criticise in his ideas. Had he been able to shake
himself free of the family, he would have liked nothing better than to
possess a ranch in America or a sheep station in New South Wales. All
his life, he longed, in secret, for open air, and freedom, and the
society of men whose interests did not stop at Temple Bar; but, in the
end, Fate, in the form of a business bequeathed him by his father, sent
him to the City, and he resolutely put his dreams on one side. The
inevitable happened. He was essentially an honourable man, and, not
understanding the meaning of Commercial Morality, he imagined that
other men in the City were the same; consequently, he met the fate of
he who of old went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, though there was no
Samaritan to sympathise; rather otherwise, in fact, for his fellows
shook their heads scornfully over his failure, whilst admiring the
business capacity of those into whose hands his capital had passed.

The process of Mr. Grierson's ruin had been a comparatively sl