What sort of a man, for example, must the
hero be to fall into and remain in such an error regarding the character
of the heroine? He must, I concluded, be a person of great simplicity and
honesty of character, with a strong tinge of ideality and imagination, and
with little or no education.
These considerations indicated a person destitute of known parentage, and
growing up more or less apart from civilization, but possessing by nature
an artistic or poetic temperament. Fore-glimpses of the further
development of the story led me to make him the child of a wealthy English
nobleman, but born in a remote New England village. His artistic
proclivities must be inherited from his father, who was, therefore,
endowed with a talent for amateur sketching in oils; which talent, again,
led him, during his minority, to travel on the continent for purposes of
artistic study. While in Paris, this man, Floyd Vivian, meets a young
Frenchwoman, whom he secretly marries, and with whom he elopes to America.
Then Vivian receives news of his father's death, compelling him to return
to England; and he leaves his wife behind him.
A child (Jack, the hero of the story) is born during his absence, and the
mother dies.
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