n; a woman whom others longed for desperately and in
vain was his when he chose to extend his hand to her. He saw, too, an
appropriateness in the chance which offered him such a wife; Beatrice
was in harmony with the future to which he aspired. Her property joined
to his would make him so wealthy that he might aim almost at anything;
political and social progress would aid each other, both rapid. Beatrice
was in many respects brilliant; there was no station that she would not
become; she had the tastes and habits of society. He compared her with
his career; she represented worldly success, the things which glitter on
the outside--action, voice; even her magnificent powers of song he used
as parallel--the gods forgive him!--to his own forensic abilities.
Supposing he must marry early, and not rather expect the day when he
might bid for a partner from a rank considerably above his own, Beatrice
was clearly the one wife for him. She would devote herself with ardour
to his worldly interests--for he began to understand that the
divergence of her expressed views meant little in comparison with her
heart's worship--and would enable him immediately to exchange the social
inferiority of bachelor life for the standing of a man with his own very
substantial roof-tree; she would have her drawing-room, which might be
made a _salon_, where politics and art might rule alternately.

This was doing injustice to Beatrice, and Wilfrid felt it; but it was
thus he regarded her as in distinction from the woman who should have
been his wife. She typified his chosen career; that other path which had
lain open to him, the path of intellectual endeavour, of idealism
incompatible with loud talk, of a worship which knew no taint of
time-serving, that for ever was represented by the image of the woman he
had lost. Her memory was encompassed with holiness. He never heard the
name she bore without a thrill of high emotion, the touch of exalted
enthusiasm; 'Emily' was written in starlight. Those aspects of her face
which had answered to the purest moments of his rapturous youth were as
present as if she had been his daily companion. He needed no picture to
recall her countenance; often he had longed for the skill of an artist,
that he might portray that grave sweetness, that impassioned faith, to
be his soul's altar-piece. Lost, lost! and, with her, lost the
uncompromising zeal of his earliest manhood. Only too consciously he had
descended to a lower l