But in that case love might be self-deception.  In that case, perfect love was impossible save as a result of perfect knowledge.

What part had reason in the impulses which possessed her from her first meeting with Reuben in Italy, unless that name were given to the working of mysterious affinities, afterwards to be justified by experience?

Cecily had been long content to accept love as an ultimate fact of her being.  But it was not Reuben’s arguments only that led her to ponder its nature and find names for its qualities.  By this time she had become conscious that her love as a wife was somehow altered, modified, since she had been a mother.  The time of passionate reveries was gone by.  She no longer wrote verses.  The book was locked up and kept hidden; if ever she resumed her diary, it must be in a new volume, for that other was sacred to an undivided love.  It would now have been mere idle phrasing, to say that Reuben was all in all to her.  And she could not think of this without some sadness.

To the average woman maternity is absorbing.  Naturally so, for the average woman is incapable of poetical passion, and only too glad to find something that occupies her thoughts from morning to night, a relief from the weariness of her unfruitful mind.  It was not to he expected that Cecily, because she had given birth to a child, should of a sudden convert herself into a combination of wet and dry nurse, after the common model.  The mother’s love was strong in her, but it could not destroy, nor even keep in long abeyance, those intellectual energies which characterized her.  Had she been constrained to occupy herself ceaselessly with the demands of babyhood, something more than impatience would shortly have been roused in her:  she would have rebelled against the conditions of her sex; the gentle melancholy with which she now looked back upon the early days of marriage would have become a bitter protest against her slavery to nature.  These possibilities in the modern woman correspond to that spirit in the modern man which is in revolt against the law of labour.  Picture Reuben Elgar reduced to the necessity of toiling for daily bread—­that is to say, brought down from his pleasant heights of civilization to the dull plain where nature tells a man that if he would eat he must first sweat at the furrow; one hears his fierce objurgations, his haughty railing against the gods.  Cecily did not represent that extreme type of woman to whom the bearing of children has become in itself repugnant; but she was very far removed from that other type which the world at large still makes its ideal of the feminine.  With what temper would she have heard the lady in her aunt’s drawing-room, who was of opinion that she should “stay at home and mind the baby”?  Education had made her an individual; she was nurtured into the disease of thought This child of hers showed in the frail tenure on which it held its breath how unfit the mother was for fulfilling her natural functions.  Both parents seemed in admirable health, yet their offspring was a poor, delicate, nervous creature, formed for exquisite sensibility to every evil of life.  Cecily saw this, and partly understood it; her heart was heavy through the long anxious nights passed in watching by the cradle.