t 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. 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 friendship. He
liked them well enough, but shut them up in that compartment of life
which was devoted to work. Hitherto, indeed, he had found little
difficulty in arranging his life as methodically as he arranged his
expenditure, but about this time he began to encounter experiences which
were not so easy to classify. Mary Datchet had begun this confusion two
years ago by bursting into laughter at some remark of his, almost the
first time they met. She could not explain why it was. She thought him
quite astonishingly odd. When he knew her well enough to tell her how he
spent Monday and Wednesday and Saturday, she was still more amused; she
laughed till he laughed, too, without knowing why. It seemed to her very
odd that he should know as much about breeding bulldogs as any man in
England; that he had a collection of wild flowers found near London;
and his weekly visit to old Miss Trotter at Ealing, who was an authority
upon the science of Heraldry, never failed to excite her laughter. She
wanted to know everything, even the kind of cake which the old lady
supplied on these occas