“A baby isn’t a rational creature,” he said once.  “When he is old enough to begin to be educated, that will be a different thing.  At present he is only a burden.  Perhaps you think me an unfatherly brute?”

“No; I can understand you quite well.  I should very often be impatient myself if I had no servants to help me.”

“What a horrible thought!  Suppose, Ciss, we all of a sudden lost everything, and we had to go and live in a garret, and I had to get work as a clerk at five-and-twenty shillings a week.  How soon should we hate the sight of each other, and the sound of each other’s voices?”

“It might come to that,” replied Cecily, with half a smile.  “Perhaps.”

“There’s no doubt about it.”

Cecily remembered something she had written in the book with the silver lock—­a book which had not been opened for a long time.

“I used to think nothing could bring that about.  And I am not sure yet.”

“I should behave like a ruffian.  I know myself well enough.”

“I think that would kill my love in time.”

“Of course it would.  How can any one love what is not lovable?”

“Yet we hear,” suggested Cecily, “of wretched women remaining devoted to husbands who all but murder them now and then.”

“You are not so foolish as to call that love!  That is mere unreasoning and degraded habit—­the same kind of thing one may find in a dog.”

“Has love anything to do with reason, Reuben?”

“As I understand it, it has everything to do with reason.  Animal passion has not, of course; but love is made of that with something added.  Can my reason discover any argument why I should not love you?  I won’t say that it might not, some day, and then my love would by so much be diminished.”

“You believe that reason is free to exercise itself, where love is in possession?”

“I believe that love can only come when reason invites.  Of course, we are talking of love between men and women; the word has so many senses.  In this highest sense, it is one of the rarest of things.  How many wives and husbands love each other?  Not one pair in five thousand.  In the average pair that have lived together as long as we have, there is not only mutual criticism, but something even of mutual dislike.  That makes love impossible.  Habit takes its place.”

“Happily for the world.”

“I don’t know.  Perhaps so.  It is an ignoble necessity; but then, the world largely consists of ignoble creatures.”

Cecily reflected often on this conversation.  Was there any significance in such reasonings?  It gave her keen pleasure to hear Reuben maintain such a view, but did it mean anything?  If, in meditating about him, she discovered characteristics of his which she could have wished to change, which in themselves were certainly not lovable, had she in that moment ceased to love him, in love’s highest sense?