After hearing this caricature of Clare’s opinion
poor Tess was glad that she had not said a word in
a weak moment about her family—even though
it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the
circle and become a new one. Besides, another
diary-girl was as good as she, it seemed, in that
respect. She held her tongue about the d’Urberville
vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she
bore. The insight afforded into Clare’s
character suggested to her that it was largely owing
to her supposed untraditional newness that she had
won interest in his eyes.
XX
The season developed and matured. Another year’s
instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes,
finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their
positions where only a year ago others had stood in
their place when these were nothing more than germs
and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise
drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks,
lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals,
and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
Dairyman Crick’s household of maids and men
lived on comfortably, placidly, even merrily.
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions
in the social scale, being above the line at which
neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances
begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of
threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems
to be the one thing aimed at out of doors. Tess
and Clare unconsciously studied each other, ever balanced
on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out
of it. All the while they were converging, under
an irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one
vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as
she was now, possibly never would be so happy again.
She was, for one thing, physically and mentally suited
among these new surroundings. The sapling which
had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot
of its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil.
Moreover she, and Clare also, stood as yet on the
debatable land between predilection and love; where
no profundities have been reached; no reflections
have set in, awkwardly inquiring, “Whither does
this new current tend to carry me? What does
it mean to my future? How does it stand towards
my past?”
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare
as yet—a rosy, warming apparition which
had only just acquired the attribute of persistence
in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind
to be occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation
to be no more than a philosopher’s regard of
an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen
of womankind.
