latch stepped back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung himself
down into a chair before speaking.
'Tess--I couldn't help it!' he began desperately, as he wiped his
heated face, which had also a superimposed flush of excitement. 'I
felt that I must call at least to ask how you are. I assure you I
had not been thinking of you at all till I saw you that Sunday; now I
cannot get rid of your image, try how I may! It is hard that a good
woman should do harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only
pray for me, Tess!'
The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost pitiable, and yet
Tess did not pity him.
'How can I pray for you,' she said, 'when I am forbidden to believe
that the great Power who moves the world would alter His plans on my
account?'
'You really think that?'
'Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking otherwise.'
'Cured? By whom?'
'By my husband, if I must tell.'
'Ah--your husband--your husband! How strange it seems! I remember
you hinted something of the sort the other day. What do you really
believe in these matters, Tess?' he asked. 'You seem to have no
religion--perhaps owing to me.'
'But I have. Though I don't believe in anything supernatural.'
D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.
'Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?'
'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
