Philip Carey’s life is a long apprenticeship in becoming — of a self formed by books, masters, love, failure and work. Born a delicate, club‑footed only child into genteel poverty, he is moved from a passionately affectionate infancy into the constrained moralities of his uncle and aunt at Blackstable. At school he seeks refuge in reading and in the encouragement of the energetic headmaster Mr. Perkins; a precocious religious sensibility yields to wider horizons when, as a youth, he goes to Heidelberg and then to Paris in quest of languages, ideas and art.

In Heidelberg he encounters Hayward, Weeks and Wharton and abandons inherited Christian certainties under the pull of modern thought and drama. Paris delivers bohemian exhilaration and humiliation alike: Amitrano’s studio and the Quartier’s cafés expand his tastes (Manet, Monet, Degas) while Foinet’s brutal verdict and the Salon’s rejection of his portrait of Miguel Ajuria provoke crippling doubt. Intimate liaisons — a small pension scandal, a flattering and fraught affair with Miss Wilkinson, the suicidally tragic Fanny Price — dramatize the precariousness of aesthetic aspiration. The critic‑poet Cronshaw, with his aphorisms, haunts Philip’s moral imagination; his death in Philip’s rooms forces a bleak reckoning about art and mortality.

Disillusioned and short of money, Philip returns to England, abandons art and re‑enters medicine at St. Luke’s. His hospital life brings practical training, friendships (Griffiths; devoted nurse Griffiths later vacillates precipitously), and ethical challenges. Romance is ambivalent and destructive: Norah Nesbit offers steady affection and practical warmth, but Philip’s consuming idealization attaches him instead to Mildred Miller, a capricious shopgirl whose gratitude alternates with indifference and betrayal. Mildred’s affairs (notably with Griffiths), pregnancies and desertions humiliate Philip and bleed him financially; his readiness to sacrifice money and dignity makes him vulnerable to opportunism.

Ruined by speculative losses and wartime market swings, and deprived of immediate family support, Philip falls into penury. The Athelnys — Thorpe Athelny and his family — provide sanctuary and help that lead to work at Lynn & Sedley as a shop‑walker and later as a designer in Mr. Sampson’s costume department. The drapery years, described in documentary detail, give him steady wages but gnaw at his sense of vocation. When his ailing uncle, the Vicar of Blackstable, dies, a modest legacy enables Philip to return to surgical study. He qualifies, endures locums (notably under the kindly Dr. South), accepts an assistantship at St. Luke’s, and forms a domestic attachment to Sally Athelny that promises steadiness.

Across these episodes the novel traces a bildungsroman of compromise and recovery: the collision of aesthetic yearning and practical duty; the moral cost of self‑sacrifice; the social contingencies of fortune; and a man’s slow construction of a life out of defeats, loyalties and the hard arithmetic of work.