g 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 sha