But the hero, Edwin Clayhanger, is something different. In the head of Edwin the boy "a flame burnt that was like an altar-fire." But would the atmosphere of the Potteries be damp enough to quench that flame? Or did that flame burn intensely enough to survive so that his spirit should rise out of the commerce, the routine, the unaspiring neighbourly atmosphere which is the dull _clay_ of life? He longed to be an architect. He did not understand architecture, he was unaware of its finest possibilities, but something in him akin to the art-impulse made him long to be an architect. But his father stamped out that ambition. He entered his father's works, and, however rebellious at heart, was continually submissive to his overmastering will. But once, when the routine was settling down upon him, illumined only a little by vaguely directed reading, his soul was burst out of its environment by a passionate love which grew in a day; which seemed to win success; but was thwarted by the woman who, without a word, incomprehensibly, jilts him. The years pass on--Mr. Bennett's transitions make us imagine forlorn, almost intolerable passages of years in which the human soul trudges stupidly and wearily towards death, discussing muffins and tea whilst the Cosmos is plotting upheavals for the sole benefit of stupidity in the mass--and Edwin, suffering at his father's hands, triumphing over him in old age, is becoming an ordinary inhabitant of Bursley, working, resting, taking his ease. Sometimes the smouldering flame bursts out in him again, and he would perceive that he had been nothing, achieved nothing, that he had been a mere "spendthrift of time and years." "And there was he, Edwin, eating bacon and eggs opposite his sister in the humdrum dining-room at Bleakridge." But the flame breaks out once more. Art had had no chance to claim him for its own, and Love had cheated him. But when he discovers Hilda, and Hilda's son, and Hilda's misery--Hilda, "with her passion for Victor Hugo, obliged by circumstances to polish a brass door-plate surreptitiously at night!"-with her, love, passion, pity, intensity of living come back to him.