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
difficult profession, but the old conclusion to which Ralph had come
when he left college still held sway in his mind, and tinged his views
with the melancholy belief that life for most people compels the
exercise of the lower gifts and wastes the precious ones, until it
forces us to agree that there is little virtue, as well as little
profit, in what once seemed to us the noblest part of our inheritance.
Denham was not altogether popular either in his office or among his
family. He was too positive, at this stage of his career, as to what
was right and what wrong, too proud of his self-control, and, as is
natural in the case of persons not altogether happy or well suited in
their conditions, too apt to prove the folly of contentment, if he
found any one who confessed to that weakness. In the office his rather
ostentatious efficiency annoyed those who took their own work more
lightly, and, if they foretold his advancement, it was not altogether
sympathetically.
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