In the light of James's contemporary critical writings and of the precepts of the aesthetic movement, Mark Ambient emerges not as a Wildean aesthete but rather as James's spokesman on the art of fiction. In espousing a realistic theory of art, in stressing the artist's right to treat all of life without puritanical restrictions, and in his passionate concern for formal perfection, Ambient voices the ideals of the serious, literary side of the aesthetic movement. His sister represents its excesses and affectations; his wife, the Puritan- Philistine hatred and fear of art; and the narrator, the disciple who, until enlightened through his encounter with the artist, had naively subscribed to the art for art's sake formula. Though Ambient is artistically daring, in his personal life he is respectable and morally responsible. However, the fusion in the story between the aesthetic ideas and the moral, psychological conflict is imperfect. Though there is a suggestion that Ambient's imaginative openness to life has led to a culpable passivity in his role as husband and father, his responsibility for the child's death is inadequately related to his portrayal as an artist and the passages expounding his views on art seem incompletely assimilated to the action.