Wolf Solent - pg. 491

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 thought 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.