When Arnold is seven, the Waterlow family moves to a smaller house in Ilford due to money troubles.
Because the family must live on a much-reduced income, Arnold is forced to leave Cheltenham and go to work as an office boy for a cheesemonger in London.
When Arnold is twenty, he meets fourteen-year-old Rosalind (“Linda”) Verney at Winifred’ Godden's birthday party.
Rosalind plays her violin at Winifred's birthday party, but is unable to complete the Kreutzer Sonata and breaks down in tears.
Rosalind gives a successful recital in Steinway Hall in London, and continues to study violin in Leipzig, hesitant to perform again until she is a better violinist.
Arnold spends a lot of time with Rosalind, yet is hesitant to declare his feelings for her because he is too poor to marry.
Max marries Molly Dexter, a wealthy American woman who has enough money to support his musical career.
Rosalind accepts Arnold, but tells him she won't be able to resist running away with Max if he shows up again.
Rosalind writes to Arnold, asking him to visit her poor friend Effie Warren.
They eventually fall in love and begin an affair, despite the firm disapproval of Arnold's mother.
In the 1925 edition of The Sewanee Review, George Herbert Clarke wrote, “Miss Sinclair's Arnold is a real figure, a true comrade in his search through Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Berkeley, and his own manly mind, for the God-beyond-God.
As in Mary Olivier and Harriet Frean, the life is traced from infancy, with a deft detailing and loving irony.
Arnold's boyhood at home and at school, his rigid yet unsophisticated mother, his reckless brother and superior sister, his friendships, his loves, the routine of his daily life, his ungrudging sacrifices, and above all, his deeper thoughts as evoked in soliloquy and conversation, are faithfully set down for us.