“A good deal of it.”

“H’m—­and yet I’ve felt so sure about it,” he said uneasily.

“I believe in the SPIRIT of the Sermon on the Mount, and so did my dear husband...  But I don’t believe—­”

Here she gave her negations.

“The fact is,” said d’Urberville drily, “whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part.  That’s just like you women.  Your mind is enslaved to his.”

“Ah, because he knew everything!” said she, with a triumphant simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most perfect man could hardly have deserved, much less her husband.

“Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale from another person like that.  A pretty fellow he must be to teach you such scepticism!”

“He never forced my judgement!  He would never argue on the subject with me!  But I looked at it in this way; what he believed, after inquiring deep into doctrines, was much more likely to be right than what I might believe, who hadn’t looked into doctrines at all.”

“What used he to say?  He must have said something?”

She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter of Angel Clare’s remarks, even when she did not comprehend their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with her at his side.  In delivering it she gave also Clare’s accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.

“Say that again,” asked d’Urberville, who had listened with the greatest attention.

She repeated the argument, and d’Urberville thoughtfully murmured the words after her.

“Anything else?” he presently asked.

“He said at another time something like this”; and she gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled in many a work of the pedigree ranging from the Dictionnaire Philosophique to Huxley’s Essays.

“Ah—­ha!  How do you remember them?”

“I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn’t wish me to; and I managed to coax him to tell me a few of his thoughts.  I can’t say I quite understand that one; but I know it is right.”

“H’m.  Fancy your being able to teach me what you don’t know yourself!”

He fell into thought.

“And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his,” she resumed.  “I didn’t wish it to be different.  What’s good enough for him is good enough for me.”

“Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?”

“No—­I never told him—­if I am an infidel.”

“Well—­you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after all!  You don’t believe that you ought to preach my doctrine, and, therefore, do no despite to your conscience in abstaining.  I do believe I ought to preach it, but, like the devils, I believe and tremble, for I suddenly leave off preaching it, and give way to my passion for you.”