It is the story of Rickie, a sensitive and intelligent young man with a certain amount of literary talent and a modest fortune, who sets out from Cambridge with the intention of writing. His stories are not successful and in order to marry the beautiful but shallow Agnes he agrees to abandon his writing and become a schoolmaster at a second-rate public school. This abandonment of personal and real values for those of the world leads him gradually into a living death of conformity and spiritual hypocrisy.

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Rickie Elliot, a sensitive and congenitally lame young man, orphaned at the age of 15, escapes from the misery of suburban life and the bullying of public school to Cambridge, where, like Forster himself, he finds sympathetic friends, chief amongst them Ansell, a grocer's son. He has literary aspirations (his short stories, Arcadian pastoral fantasies, are remarkably like Forster's own),but is also attracted by Agnes Pembroke, the conventional but beautiful sister of a schoolmaster friend and protector, and by her handsome, athletic, ex-bully fiancé Gerald.