The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings—­now a heap of ruins.  He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers.  She feared she was in the way and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare’s shape appeared at the door.  “You must not work like this,” he said.  “You are not my servant; you are my wife.”

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat.  “I may think myself that—­indeed?” she murmured, in piteous raillery.  “You mean in name!  Well, I don’t want to be anything more.”

“You MAY think so, Tess!  You are.  What do you mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said hastily, with tears in her accents.  “I thought I—­because I am not respectable, I mean.  I told you I thought I was not respectable enough long ago—­and on that account I didn’t want to marry you, only—­only you urged me!”

She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him.  It would almost have won round any man but Angel Clare.  Within the remote depths of his constitution, so gentle and affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it.  It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his acceptance of Tess.  Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow:  contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise.  He waited till her sobbing ceased.

“I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,” he said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general.  “It isn’t a question of respectability, but one of principle!”

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by appearances.  There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him.  But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly opened her mouth.  The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she sought not her own; was not provoked; thought no evil of his treatment of her.  She might just now have been Apostolic Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.