Allan Wayworth had returned to England, at two-and-twenty, after a
miscellaneous continental education; his father, the correspondent,
for years, in several foreign countries successively, of a
conspicuous London journal, had died just after this, leaving his
mother and her two other children, portionless girls, to subsist on a
very small income in a very dull German town. The young man's
beginnings in London were difficult, and he had aggravated them by
his dislike of journalism. His father's connection with it would
have helped him, but he was (insanely, most of his friends judged--
the great exception was always Mrs. Alsager) INTRAITABLE on the
question of form. Form--in his sense--was not demanded by English
newspapers, and he couldn't give it to them in THEIR sense. The
demand for it was not great anywhere, and Wayworth spent costly weeks
in polishing little compositions for magazines that didn't pay for
style. The only person who paid for it was really Mrs. Alsager: she
had an infallible instinct for the perfect. She paid in her own way,
and if Allan Wayworth had been a wage-earning person it would have
made him feel that if he didn't receive his legal dues his palm was
at least occasionally conscious of a gratuity. He had his
limitations, his perversities, but the finest parts of him were the
most alive, and he was restless and sincere. It is however the
impression he produced on Mrs. Alsager that most concerns us: she
thought him not only remarkably good-looking but altogether original.
There were some usual bad things he would never do--too many
prohibitive puddles for him in the short cut to success.

For himself, he had never been so happy as since he had seen his way,
as he fondly believed, to some sort of mastery of the scenic idea,
which struck him as a very different matter now that he looked at it
from within. He had had his early days of contempt for it, when it