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.