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.
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