of illusions. His vision of 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