In his heart of hearts the boy knew himself for what he was. But his good looks, his youth--most valuable asset of all!--and the fact that he would some day have some sort of settled position, enabled him to rub along pretty well for the time. Without much real harm in him--he was too lacking in temperament to be really wicked--he was as cunning as an ape and justified his good opinions of his cleverness by the fact that his laborious little tricks constantly succeeded. He was always achieving infinitesimal successes. He had marked out Gilbert Lothian, for instance, and had succeeded in making a friend of him easily enough. Lothian rarely thought ill of any one and any one could take him in. To do Ingworth justice he liked Lothian very much, and really admired him. He did not understand him in the least. His poems were rather worse Greek to him than the Euripidean choruses he had learnt by heart at school. At the same time it was a great thing to be Fidus Achates to the poet of the moment, and it was extremely convenient--also--to have a delightful country house to retire to when one was hard up, and a patron who not only introduced one to editors, but would lend five pounds as a matter of course. Perhaps there was really some Eastern taint in the young fellow's blood. At any rate he was sly by nature, had a good deal of undeveloped capability for treachery latent within him, and, encouraged by success, was becoming a marked parasite. Lazy by nature, he soon discovered how easy it was--to take one example--to look up the magazines of three years back, steal a situation or a plot, adapt it to the day, and sell it for a guinea or two. His small literary career had hitherto been just that. If he had been put upon the rack he could not have confessed to an original thought. And it was the same in many other aspects of his life. He made himself useful. He was always sympathetic and charming to some wife in Bohemia who bewailed the inconstancy of her husband, and earned the title of a "nice, good-hearted boy." On the next evening he would gladly sup with the husband and the chorus girl who was the cause of the trouble, and flatter them both. Master Dickson Ingworth, it will be seen, was by no means a person of fine nature. He was simply very young, without any sort of ideals save the gratification of the moment, and would, no doubt, become a decent member of society in time. In a lower rank of life, and without the comfortable inheritance which awaited him, he would probably have become a sneak-thief or a blackmailer in a small way. In the event, he was destined to live a happy and fairly popular life in the Wiltshire Grange, and to die a much better man than he was at two and twenty. He was not to repent of, but to forget, all the calculated meannesses of his youth, and at fifty he would have shown any one to the door with horror who suggested a single one of the tricks that he had himself been guilty of in his youth.