ssessed 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 be
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. Wit