No one could say that Wentworth was childlike, but perhaps he was a little childish.
He certainly had a _naif_ and unshakable belief that the impressions he had formed as to his own character were shared by others.

He supposed it was recognised by his neighbours that they had a thinker in their midst, and always tacitly occupied the ground which he imagined had been conceded to him on that account.
His mother, a beautiful, foolish, whimsical, hard-riding heiress, the last of a long line, had married the youngest son--the one brilliant, cultivated member--of a family as ancient, as uneducated, and as prosaic as her own.

Wentworth was the result of that union.

His father had died before his talents were fully recognised: that is to say, just when it was beginning to be perceived that he was a genius only in his own class, and that there were hordes of educated men in the middle classes who could beat him at every point on his own ground, except in carriage and appearance, and whom no one regarded as specially gifted.

Still, in his own county, among his own friends, and in a society where education and culture eke out a precarious, interloping existence, and are regarded with distrustful curiosity, Lord Wilfrid Maine lived and died, and was mourned as a genius.
After many years of uneasy, imprudent widowhood, the widow of the great man had made a disastrous second marriage, and had died at Michael's birth.
No one had disputed with Wentworth over the possession of Michael.
Wentworth, a sedate, self-centred young man of three-and-twenty, of independent means, mainly occupied in transcribing the nullity of his days in a voluminous diary, had taken charge of him virtually from his first holidays, during which Michael's father had achieved the somewhat tedious task of drinking himself to death.