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.