Life with Cecily gave predominance to all the noblest energies in his nature.  He loved with absolute sincerity; his ideal of womanhood was for the time realized and possessed; the vagrant habit of his senses seemed permanently subdued; his mind was occupied with high admirations and creative fancies; in thought and speech he was ardent, generous, constant, hopeful.  A happy marriage can do no more for man than make unshadowed revelation of such aspiring faculty as he is endowed withal.  It cannot supply him with a force greater than he is born to; even as the happiest concurrence of healthful circumstances cannot give more strength to a physical constitution than its origin warrants.  At this period of his life, Reuben Elgar could not have been more than, with Cecily’s help, he showed himself.  Be the future advance or retrogression, he had lived the possible life.

Whose the fault that it did not continue?  Cecily’s, if it were blameworthy to demand too much; Elgar’s, if it be wrong to learn one’s own limitations.

His making definite choice of a subject whereon to employ his intellect was at one and the same time a proof of how far his development had progressed and a warning of what lay before him.  However chaotic the material in which he proposed to work, however inadequate his powers, it was yet a truth that, could he execute anything at all, it would be something of the kind thus vaguely contemplated.  His intellect was combative, and no subject excited it to such activity as this of Hebraic constraint in the modern world.  Elgar’s book, supposing him to have been capable of writing it, would have resembled no other; it would have been, as he justly said, unique in its anti-dogmatic passion.  It was quite in the order of things that he should propose to write it; equally so, that the attempt should mark the end of his happiness.

For all that she seemed to welcome the proposal with enthusiasm, Cecily’s mind secretly misgave her.  She had begun to understand Reuben, and she foresaw, with a certainty which she in vain tried to combat, how soon his energy would fail upon so great a task.  Impossible to admonish him; impossible to direct him on a humbler path, where he might attain some result.  With Reuben’s temperament to deal with, that would mean a fatal disturbance of their relations to each other.  That the disturbance must come in any case, now that he was about to prove himself, she anticipated in many a troubled moment, but would not let the forecast discourage her.

Elgar knew how his failure in perseverance affected her; he looked for the signs of her disappointment, and was at no loss to find them. it was natural to him to exaggerate the diminution of her esteem; he attributed to her what, in her place, he would himself have felt; he soon imagined that she had as good as ceased to love him.  He could not bear to be less in her eyes than formerly; a jealous shame stung him, and at length made him almost bitter against her.