was given £10 for the copyright; so when he was eighteen
began that long tale of financial mishandling of his books,
for The Brown Owl he later said, 'sold many thousands more
copies than any other book I ever wrote . . . and keeps on
selling to this day'.

Thus unwillingly was Ford launched upon the approved
way. By 1896 he had six books, including poems and a bio-
graphy of his grandfather, to his name. But if he could not
be a 'grand gentleman', he could behave like one. He
developed a drawl, a careful carelessness about clothes, an
appearance of indolence, and to such effect that a few years
later even so seasoned an observer as Henry James could
accept him, almost if not quite, at face value. He drew him as
Morton Densher in The Wings of a Dove:

He was a longish, leanish, fairish young Englishman, not un-
amenable on certain sides to classification--as for instance being a
gentleman, by being rather specifically one of the educated, one of
the generally sound and generally civil; yet, though to that degree
neither extraordinary nor abnormal, he would have failed to play
straight into the observer's hands. He was young for the House of
Commons; he was loose for the Army. He was refined, as might
have been said, for the city and quite apart from the cut of his cloth,
sceptical, it might have been felt, for the Church. On the other hand,
he was credulous for diplomacy, or perhaps even for science, while
at the same time he was perhaps too much in his mere senses for
poetry and yet too little in them for art . . . The difficulty with
Densher was that he looked vague without looking weak--idle
without looking empty. It was the accident, possibly, of his long
legs which were apt to stretch themselves; of his straight hair, and
well-shaped head, never, the latter neatly smooth, and apt into the
bargain . . . to throw itself suddenly back and, supported behind by
his uplifted arms and interlocked hands, place him for unconscion-
able periods in communion with the ceiling, the tree-tops, the
sky . . .

Later still Ford adopted the poses of country squire (grow-
ing prize pigs), or the man in close touch with State affairs
(he was friendly with a junior Minister called C. F. G.
Masterman), or 'the cher maître' of 'les jeunes' (to some

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