; but love is made of that with something added. Can my reason
discover any argument why I should not love you? I won't say that it might not,
some day, and then my love would by so much be diminished.«
    »You believe that reason is free to exercise itself, where love is in
possession?«
    »I believe that love can only come when reason invites. Of course, we are
talking of love between men and women; the word has so many senses. In this
highest sense, it is one of the rarest of things. How many wives and husbands
love each other? Not one pair in five thousand. In the average pair that have
lived together as long as we have, there is not only mutual criticism, but
something even of mutual dislike. That makes love impossible. Habit takes its
place.«
    »Happily for the world.«
    »I don't know. Perhaps so. It is an ignoble necessity; but then, the world
largely consists of ignoble creatures.«
    Cecily reflected often on this conversation. Was there any significance in
such reasonings? It gave her keen pleasure to hear Reuben maintain such a view,
but did it mean anything? If, in meditating about him, she discovered
characteristics of his which she could have wished to change, which in
themselves were certainly not lovable, had she in that moment ceased to love
him, in love's highest sense?
    But in that case love might be self-deception. In that case, perfect love
was impossible save as a result of perfect knowledge.
    What part had reason in the impulses which possessed 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.