At the age of eighteen, Louis Fores, amiable, personable, and an orphan, was looking for a career.  He had lived in the London suburb of Barnes, and under the influence of a father whose career had chiefly been to be the stepbrother of Lieutenant-General Fores.  He was in full possession of the conventionally snobbish ideals of the suburb, reinforced by more than a tincture of the stupendous and unsurpassed snobbishness of the British Army.  He had no money, and therefore the liberal professions and the higher division of the Civil Service were closed to him.  He had the choice of two activities:  he might tout for wine, motor-cars, or mineral-waters on commission (like his father), or he might enter a bank; his friends were agreed that nothing else was conceivable.  He chose the living grave.  It is not easy to enter the living grave, but, august influences aiding, he entered it with eclat at a salary of seventy pounds a year, and it closed over him.  He would have been secure till his second death had he not defiled the bier.  The day of judgment occurred, the grave opened, and he was thrown out with ignominy, but ignominy unpublished.  The august influences, by simple cash, and for their own sakes, had saved him from exposure and a jury.

In order to get rid of him his protectors spoke well of him, emphasizing his many good qualities, and he was deported to the Five Towns (properly enough, since his grandfather had come thence) and there joined the staff of Batchgrew & Sons, thanks to the kind intervention of Mrs. Maldon.  At the end of a year John Batchgrew told him to go, and told Mrs. Maldon that her grand-nephew had a fault.  Mrs. Maldon was very sorry.  At this juncture Louis Fores, without intending to do so, would certainly have turned Mrs. Maldon’s last years into a tragedy, had he not in the very nick of time inherited about a thousand pounds.  He was rehabilitated.  He “had money” now.  He had a fortune; he had ten thousand pounds; he had any sum you like, according to the caprice of rumour.  He lived on his means for a little time, frequenting the Municipal School of Art at the Wedgwood Institution at Bursley, and then old Batchgrew had casually suggested to Mrs. Maldon that there ought to be an opening for him with Jim Horrocleave, who was understood to be succeeding with his patent special processes for earthenware manufacture.  Mr. Horrocleave, a man with a chin, would not accept him for a partner, having no desire to share profits with anybody; but on the faith of his artistic tendency and Mrs. Maldon’s correct yet highly misleading catalogue of his virtues, he took him at a salary, in return for which Louis was to be the confidential employee who could and would do anything, including design.