And so it was with Warrington.  He had once been good, wholly good and kind and wise, lofty as a rural poet who has seen nothing of life save nature’s pure and visible face.  In the heat of battle he had been strong, but success had subtly eaten into the fibers and loosed his hold, and had swept him onward into that whirlpool out of which no man emerges wholly undefiled.  It takes a great and strong man to withstand success, and Warrington was only a genius.  It was not from lack of will power; rather it was because he was easy-going and loved pleasure for its own sake.  He had fought and starved, and now for the jingle of the guinea in his pocket and the junkets of the gay!  The prodigality of these creative beings is not fully understood by the laity, else they would forgive more readily the transgressions.  Besides, the harbor of family ties is a man’s moral bulwark; and Warrington drifted hither and thither with no harbor in view at all.

He had been an orphan since his birth; a mother meant simply a giver of life, and a father meant, even less.  Until he had read the reverse and obverse sides of life, his sense of morality had lain dormant and untilled.  Such was his misfortune.  The solitary relative he laid claim to was an aged aunt, his father’s sister.  For her he had purchased a beautiful place in the town of his birth, vaguely intending to live out his old age there.

There had been a fight for all he possessed.  Good had not come easily, as it does to some particularly favored mortals.  There was no family, aristocracy to back him up, no melancholy recollections of past grandeur to add the interest of romance to his endeavors.  His father had been a poor man of the people, a farmer.  And yet Warrington was by no means plebeian.  Somewhere there was a fine strain.  It had been a fierce struggle to complete a college education.  In the summer-time he had turned his hand to all sorts of things to pay his winter’s tuition.  He had worked as clerk in summer hotels, as a surveyor’s assistant in laying street-railways, he had played at private secretary, he had hawked vegetables about the streets at dawn.  Happily, he had no false pride.  Chance moves quite as mysteriously as the tides.  On leaving college he had secured a minor position on one of the daily newspapers, and had doggedly worked his way up to the coveted position of star-reporter.  Here the latent power of the story-teller, the poet and the dramatist was awakened; in any other pursuit the talent would have quietly died, as it has died in the breasts of thousands who, singularly enough, have not stood in the path of Chance.

Socially, Warrington was one of the many nobodies; and if he ever attended dinners and banquets and balls, it was in the capacity of reporter.  But his cynical humor, which was manifest even in his youth, saved him the rancor and envy which is the portion of the outsider.