Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours, without the sense of a will.  The word had been given; the number of the day written down.  Her naturally bright intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic convictions common to field-folk and those who associate more extensively with natural phenomena than with their fellow-creatures; and she accordingly drifted into that passive responsiveness to all things her lover suggested, characteristic of the frame of mind.

But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify the wedding-day; really to again implore her advice.  It was a gentleman who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had not sufficiently considered.  A post-nuptial explanation, which might be accepted with a light heart by a rougher man, might not be received with the same feeling by him.  But this communication brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.

Despite Angel Clare’s plausible representation to himself and to Tess of the practical need for their immediate marriage, there was in truth an element of precipitancy in the step, as became apparent at a later date.  He loved her dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him.  He had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the scenes.  Unsophistication was a thing to talk of; but he had not known how it really struck one until he came here.  Yet he was very far from seeing his future track clearly, and it might be a year or two before he would be able to consider himself fairly started in life.  The secret lay in the tinge of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the sense that he had been made to miss his true destiny through the prejudices of his family.

“Don’t you think ’twould have been better for us to wait till you were quite settled in your midland farm?” she once asked timidly.  (A midland farm was the idea just then.)

“To tell the truth, my Tess, I don’t like you to be left anywhere away from my protection and sympathy.”

The reason was a good one, so far as it went.  His influence over her had been so marked that she had caught his manner and habits, his speech and phrases, his likings and his aversions.  And to leave her in farmland would be to let her slip back again out of accord with him.  He wished to have her under his charge for another reason.  His parents had naturally desired to see her once at least before he carried her off to a distant settlement, English or colonial; and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to change his intention, he judged that a couple of months’ life with him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous opening would be of some social assistance to her at what she might feel to be a trying ordeal—­her presentation to his mother at the Vicarage.