of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered judgement that day.
Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain had kept
apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what had occurred,
while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of circumstance
disquieted him--palpitating, contemplative being that he was. He
could hardly realize their true relations to each other as yet, and
what their mutual bearing should be before third parties
thenceforward.
Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that his temporary
existence here was to be the merest episode in his life, soon passed
through and early forgotten; he had come as to a place from which
as from a screened alcove he could calmly view the absorbing world
without, and, apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman--
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,
How curious you are to me!--
resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But behold,
the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What had been the
engrossing world had dissolved into an uninteresting outer dumb-show;
while here, in this apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty
had volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started up
elsewhere.
Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear across the
yard each trivial sound of the retiring household. The dairy-house,
so humble, so insignificant, so purely to him a place of constrained
sojourn that he had never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance
to be reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the
landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick gables
breathed forth 'Stay!' The windows smiled, the door coaxed and
beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A personality within
it was so far-reaching in her influence as to spread into and make
the bricks, mortar, and whole overhanging sky throb with a burning
sensibility. Whose was this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.
It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the life of the
obscure dairy had become to him. And though new love was to be held
partly responsible for this, it was not solely so. Many besides
Angel have learnt that the magnitude of lives is not as to their
external displacements, but as to their subjective experiences. The
impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life
than the pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life
was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.
Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was a man with
a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature to toy with and
dismiss; but a woman living her precious life--a life which, to
herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension
as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations
the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her
fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into
being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which
she was born.
This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the single
