 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
