Having breakfasted, he stood idly at the window of his sitting-room.  His lodgings were in Upper Woburn Place, nearly opposite the church of St. Pancras.  He had read, he knew not where, that the crowning portion of that remarkable edifice was modelled on the Temple of the Winds at Athens, and, as he gazed at it this morning, he suffered from the thought of his narrow experience in travel.  A glimpse of the Netherlands, of France, of Switzerland, was all he could boast.  His income had only just covered his expenditure; the holiday season always found him more or less embarrassed, and unable to go far afield.  What Can one do on a paltry three hundred a year?  Yet he regretted that he had not used a stricter economy.  He might have managed in cheaper rooms; he might have done without this and the other little luxury.  To have travelled widely would now be of some use to him; it gave a man a certain freedom in society, added an octave to the compass of his discourse.  Acquaintance with books did not serve the same end; and, though he read a good deal, Dyce was tolerably aware that not by force of erudition could he look for advancement.  He began to perceive it as a misfortune that he had not earlier in life become clear as to the nature of his ambition.  Until a couple of years ago he had scarcely been conscious of any aim at all, for the literary impulses which used to inspire his talk with Connie Bride were merely such as stir in every youth of our time; they had never got beyond talk, and, on fading away, left him without intellectual motive.  Now that he knew whither his desires and his abilities tended, he was harassed by consciousness of imperfect equipment.  Even academically he had not distinguished himself; he had made no attempt at journalism; he had not brought himself into useful contact with any political group.  All he could claim for encouragement was a personal something which drew attention, especially the attention of women, in circles of the liberal-minded—­that is to say, among people fond of talking more or less vaguely about very large subjects.  For talk he never found himself at a loss, and his faculty in this direction certainly grew.  But as yet he had not discovered the sphere which was wholly sympathetic and at the same time fertile of opportunity.

Among the many possibilities of life which lie before a young and intelligent man, one never presented itself to Dyce Lashmar’s meditation.  The thought of simply earning his living by conscientious and useful work, satisfied with whatever distinction might come to him in the natural order of things, had never entered his mind.  Every project he formed took for granted his unlaborious pre-eminence in a toiling world.  His natural superiority to mankind at large was, with Dyce, axiomatic.  If he used any other tone about himself, he affected it merely to elicit contradiction; if in a depressed mood he thought otherwise, the reflection was so at conflict with his nature that it served only to strengthen his self-esteem when the shadow had passed.