his own future, unlike many such forecasts,
could have been made public at any moment without a blush; he attributed
to himself a strong brain, and conferred on himself a seat in the House
of Commons at the age of fifty, a moderate fortune, and, with luck,
an unimportant office in a Liberal Government. There was nothing
extravagant in a forecast of that kind, and certainly nothing
dishonorable. Nevertheless, as his sister guessed, it needed all Ralph's
strength of will, together with the pressure of circumstances, to
keep his feet moving in the path which led that way. It needed, in
particular, a constant repetition of a phrase to the effect that he
shared the common fate, found it best of all, and wished for no other;
and by repeating such phrases he acquired punctuality and habits of
work, and could very plausibly demonstrate that to be a clerk in a
solicitor's office was the best of all possible lives, and that other
ambitions were vain.

But, like all beliefs not genuinely held, this one depended very much
upon the amount of acceptance it received from other people, and in
private, when the pressure of public opinion was removed, Ralph let
himself swing very rapidly away from his actual circumstances upon
strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe.
In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but
self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet
to some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the
pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind that
there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called dreams, in
the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that this spirit
was the most valuable possession he had; he thought that by means of
it he could set flowering waste tracts of the earth, cure many ills, or
raise up beauty where none now existed; it was, too, a fierce and potent
spirit which would devour the dusty books and parchments on the office
wall with one lick of its tongue, and leave him in a minute standing in
nakedness, if he gave way to it. His endeavor, for many years, had been
to control the spirit, and at the age of twenty-nine he thought he could
pride himself upon a life rigidly divided into the hours of work and
those of dreams; the two lived side by side without harming each other.
As a matter of fact, this effort at discipline had been helped by the
interests of a difficul