The actual work he was engaged on lent itself to the breathless peacefulness of that grey afternoon. He had to take the gnomic commentaries and floating fragments of wicked gossip gathered together by his employer, and translate them into a style that had at least some beauty of its own. This style had been his own contribution to the book; and though it had been evoked under external pressure, and in a sense had been a tour de force, it was in its essence the expression of Wolf’s own soul⁠—the only purely aesthetic expression that Destiny had ever permitted to his deeper nature.

The further he advanced with his book the more interested he became in this aspect of it. He spent hours revising the earlier chapters, written before this style of his had established itself; and he came to value these elaborated pages as things that were precious in themselves⁠—precious independently of whether they were ever printed.

The Cerne Giant was now the subject of his efforts; and his first two renderings seemed to him hopelessly below the level of the rest of his writing.