Most of the time the writer is engaged exclusively in creativity, which brings him worldwide fame and money. He approved the "Somerset Maugham Prize", it was given to young English writers.

A few months later, the narrator is surprised to learn that Charles Strickland suddenly left his family. Everyone thinks he's gone on the run with his new lover and is living in a luxury hotel in Paris. The wife decides to forgive her husband and asks the young writer to convince her husband to return to her and the children.

Unexpectedly, the author finds Charles in a cheap hotel with almost no money. Family, the opinion of others and his own poverty do not bother Strickland at all, he decided to realize his dream, because now he is an artist.

15 years have passed; Charles Strickland has already passed away. Death came to him on the distant island of Tahiti in the form of leprosy. By the will of fate, the narrator also finds himself in this place and decides to find out how the artist lived in recent years. It turned out that he had been a beggar all this time, sleeping and eating wherever he had to. Then he married a native woman, with whom he lived until his death, this woman did not leave him even when she learned of the disease.

The author returns to London and meets Strickland's first wife. She no longer lives in poverty, as Charles left her, she received an inheritance from her late sister. Reproductions of ex-husband's paintings hang on the walls in the house. Nothing in the conversation with Mrs. Strickland gives away how he did to her, she behaves as if their relationship was quite normal.