Night and Day - The Original Classic Edition. Woolf Virginia

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 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

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       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. Indeed, he appeared to be rather a hard and self-sufficient young man, with a queer temper, and manners that were uncompromisingly abrupt, who was consumed with a desire to get on in the world, which was natural, these critics thought, in a man of no means, but not engaging.

       The young men in the office had a perfect right to these opinions, because Denham showed no particular desire for their friend-