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. With what temper would she
have heard the lady in her aunt's drawing-room, who was of opinion that she
should stay at home and mind the baby? Education had made her an individual; she
was nurtured into the disease of thought. This child of hers showed in the frail
tenure on which it held its breath how unfit the mother was for fulfilling her
natural functions. Both parents seemed in admirable health, yet their offspring
was a poor, delicate, nervous creature, formed for exquisite sensibility to
every evil of life. Cecily saw this, and partly understood it; her heart was
heavy through the long anxious nights passed in watching by the cradle.
    When they returned to London, Reuben at first made a pretence of resuming
his work. He went now and then to the reading-room, and at home shut himself up
in the study; but he no longer voluntarily talked of his task. Cecily knew what
had happened; the fatal lack of perseverance had once more declared itself. For
some weeks she refrained from