Ivy’s maternal grandmother had been the daughter of an earl’s younger son. Ivy’s father had been a not too successful tutor at one of the great public schools. An uncle of hers was a bishop—Canterbury itself not too remote a possibility—another uncle was a wealthy cheesemonger; a third a briefless barrister. A cousin of her father’s was a bank manager in Surrey, a cousin of her mother’s owned and ran a rural inn, and his son a fashionable seaside hotel. She had a score of aristocratic living kindred, and others that belonged to the lowest middle-class, a few that were frankly “trade”—and retail trade at that. Her childhood had been radiant, her girlhood anxious. Mrs. Gilbert had been a woman of extraordinary ability, as had her elder sister, Mrs. Snow. While Ivy’s mother lived the wolf that yapped now and then not far from their door never got nose or paw in. Cora Gilbert could make a delectable _entrée_ out of a bone and a bunch of herbs, a chic hat out of a yard or two of re-dyed ribbon and a card of safety pins; and she ruled her husband and ruled him well—and always she had a laugh, a smile and a gay, tender word for her man and child, and a handsome serviceable umbrella ready and waiting for the rainy day. But the mother died when the only child was scarcely fourteen; and then slowly but surely the wolf pushed in. George Gilbert was devoted and industrious, a rarely delightful companion—but he lacked the sense of proportion, was devoid of executive ability, had no mastery of detail, and he had one crass selfishness, one incurable vice. He lusted for books as its victim lusts for dope. There was not a second-hand bookshop in Westminster or Bloomsbury that did not know and welcome him. And before Ivy was sixteen more than one pawnbroker knew him well. He never borrowed, he never begged, above all he never grumbled or cringed. But he would buy books, new books and old books, big books and little, cheap and dear. And not with one would he ever part. They crowded the little home from half-basement to attic—and at his death, when Ivy was twenty, their sale at a shilling-a-volume average brought her more than nine-tenths of her heritage and the first really good gown she’d bought in six years. And though she had loved her father both tenderly and ardently, so aggrievedly had the girl resented the absence of joints and frocks for which their cost might have paid, that she grudged the sale of none of them and had kept for remembrance only three or four that he had prized most; and she had kept even them altogether out of a sense of filial duty and not in the least because she had cared to keep them.