On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and
three years after the return from Trantridge--silent, reconstructive
years for Tess Durbeyfield--she left her home for the second time.

Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later,
she started in a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle,
through which it was necessary to pass on her journey, now in a
direction almost opposite to that of her first adventuring.  On the
curve of the nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and
her father's house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily
lives as heretofore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their
consciousness, although she would be far off, and they deprived of
her smile.  In a few days the children would engage in their games as
merrily as ever, without the sense of any gap left by her departure.
This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the
best; were she to remain they would probably gain less good by her
precepts than harm by her example.

She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junction
of highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the
south-west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of
country had never yet struck across it.  While waiting, however,
there came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately
in the direction that she wished to pursue.  Though he was a stranger
to her she accepted his offer of a seat beside him, ignoring that
its motive was a mere tribute to her countenance.  He was going to
Weatherbury, and by accompanying him thither she could walk the
remainder of the distance instead of travelling in the van by way of
Casterbridge.

Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than
to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the
farmer recommended her.  Thence she started on foot, basket in hand,
to reach the wide upland of heath dividing this district from the
low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was
the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.

Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she
felt akin to the landscape.  Not so very far to the left of her she
could discern a dark patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed
her in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere--in
the church of which parish the bones of her ancestors--her useless
ancestors--lay entombed.

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the
dance they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did
she retain but the old seal and spoon.  "Pooh--I have as much of
mother as father in me!" she said.  "All my prettiness comes from
her, and she was only a dairymaid."

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon,
when she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had
anticipated, the distance being actually but a few miles.  It was
two hours, owing to sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself
on a summit commanding the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the
Great Dairies, the valley in which milk and butter grew to rankness,
and were produced more profusely, if less delicately, than at her
home--the verdant plain so well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies,
Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at
Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now.  The world was drawn
to a larger pattern here.  The enclosures numbered fifty acres
instead of ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of
cattle formed tribes hereabout; there only families.  These myriads
of cows stretching under her eyes from the far east to the far west
outnumbered any she had ever seen at one glance before. The green
lea was speckled as thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot
or Sallaert with burghers.  The ripe hue of the red and dun kine
absorbed the evening sunlight, which the white-coated animals
returned to the eye in rays almost dazzling, even at the distant
elevation on which she stood.

The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly
beautiful, perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it
was more cheering.  It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the
rival vale, and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear,
bracing, ethereal.  The river itself, which nourished the grass
and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in
Blackmoor.  Those were slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over
beds of mud into which the incautious wader might sink and vanish
unawares.  The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life
shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the shadow of a cloud, with
pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all day long.  There the
water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or
the sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes
upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully.  Her hopes mingled with
the sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she
bounded along against the soft south wind.  She heard a pleasant
voice in every breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a
joy.

Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind,
continually fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as
the thoughts were gay or grave.  One day she was pink and flawless;
another pale and tragical.  When she was pink she was feeling less
than when pale; her more perfect beauty accorded with her less
elevated mood; her more intense mood with her less perfect beauty.
It was her best face physically that was now set against the south
wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet
pleasure somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the
highest, had at length mastered Tess.  Being even now only a young
woman of twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished
growing, it was impossible that any event should have left upon her
an impression that was not in time capable of transmutation.

And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose
higher and higher.  She tried several ballads, but found them
inadequate; till, recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often
wandered over of a Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree
of knowledge, she chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye Stars ... ye
Green Things upon the Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ... Beasts and
Cattle ... Children of Men ... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and
magnify Him for ever!"

She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know
the Lord as yet."

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic
utterance in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions
are the forms and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far
more of the Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the
systematized religion taught their race at later date.  However, Tess
found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old
_Benedicite_ that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough.
Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance as that
of having started towards a means of independent living was a part of
the Durbeyfield temperament.  Tess really wished to walk uprightly,
while her father did nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in
being content with immediate and small achievements, and in having no
mind for laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as
could alone be effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the
once powerful d'Urbervilles were now.

There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended
family, as well as the natural energy of Tess's years, rekindled
after the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let
the truth be told--women do as a rule live through such humiliations,
and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an
interested eye.  While there's life there's hope is a conviction not
so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would
have us believe.

Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life,
descended the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her
pilgrimage.

The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival
vales now showed itself.  The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered
from the heights around; to read aright the valley before her it was
necessary to descend into its midst.  When Tess had accomplished this
feat she found herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which
stretched to the east and west as far as the eye could reach.

The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles
to the vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and
attenuated, lay serpentining along through the midst of its former
spoils.

Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed
expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of
indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings
than that fly.  The sole effect of her presence upon the placid
valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which,
after descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck
erect, looking at her.

Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and
repeated call--"Waow! waow! waow!"

From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by
contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog.  It was
not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess
had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time--half-past
four o'clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically
waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the
background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they
walked.  Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton
by the open gate through which they had entered before her.  Long
thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted
with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts
rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows
and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost
inconceivable in its profundity.  Between the post were ranged
the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a
whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre
of which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself
behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately inwards upon
the wall.  Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures
every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been
the profile of a court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as
diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble _facades_ long
ago, or the outline of Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs.

They were the less restful cows that were stalled.  Those that would
stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,
where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now--all prime
milchers, such as were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always
within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads
supplied at this prime season of the year.  Those of them that were
spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy,
and the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something
of military display.  Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as
sandbags, the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy's crock;
and as each animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed
forth and fell in drops to the ground.

The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out
of the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the
maids walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep
their shoes above the mulch of the barton.  Each girl sat down on
her three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting
against the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess
as she approached.  The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down,
resting flat on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not
observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man--whose long white "pinner"
was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and
whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect--the
master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as
a working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the
seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,
being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:

             Dairyman Dick
             All the week:--
     On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.

Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand--for the days were
busy ones now--and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother
and the rest of the family--(though this as a matter of form merely,
for in reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence
till apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).

"Oh--ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very well," he
said terminatively.  "Though I've never been there since.  And a aged
woman of ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long
ago, told me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor
Vale came originally from these parts, and that 'twere a old ancient
race that had all but perished off the earth--though the new
generations didn't know it.  But, Lord, I took no notice of the old
woman's ramblings, not I."

"Oh no--it is nothing," said Tess.

Then the talk was of business only.

"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows going azew at
this time o' year."

She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down.
She had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had
grown delicate.

"Quite sure you can stand it?  'Tis comfortable enough here for rough
folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber frame."

She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness
seemed to win him over.

"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals of some sort,
hey?  Not yet?  Well, do as ye like about it.  But faith, if 'twas I,
I should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."

"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment--to the
surprise--indeed, slight contempt--of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind
it had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while
holding up the pail that she sipped from.  "'Tis what I hain't
touched for years--not I.  Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds
like lead.  You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to
the nearest cow.  "Not but what she do milk rather hard.  We've hard
ones and we've easy ones, like other folks.  However, you'll find out
that soon enough."

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her
stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists
into the pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new
foundation for her future.  The conviction bred serenity, her pulse
slowed, and she was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the
men operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier
natures.  It was a large dairy.  There were nearly a hundred
milchers under Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the
master-dairyman milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away
from home.  These were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his
journey-milkmen being more or less casually hired, he would not
entrust this half-dozen to their treatment, lest, from indifference,
they should not milk them fully; nor to the maids, lest they should
fail in the same way for lack of finger-grip; with the result that in
course of time the cows would "go azew"--that is, dry up.  It was not
the loss for the moment that made slack milking so serious, but that
with the decline of demand there came decline, and ultimately
cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk
in the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the
milk-jets into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation
to one or other of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand
still. The only movements were those of the milkers' hands up and
down, and the swing of the cows' tails.  Thus they all worked on,
encompassed by the vast flat mead which extended to either slope
of the valley--a level landscape compounded of old landscapes long
forgotten, and, no doubt, differing in character very greatly from
the landscape they composed now.

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow
he had just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in
one hand and the pail in the other, and moving on to the next
hard-yielder in his vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie
down their milk to-day as usual.  Upon my life, if Winker do begin
keeping back like this, she'll not be worth going under by
midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.
"I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure.  It may be so.  I didn't think o't."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said
a dairymaid.

"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick
dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical
possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not.  But as nott
cows will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite
agree to it.  Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan?
Why do nott cows give less milk in a year than horned?"

"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman.
"Howsomever, these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk
to-day.  Folks, we must lift up a stave or two--that's the only cure
for't."

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement
to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield;
and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody--in purely
business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the
result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement
during the song's continuance.  When they had gone through fourteen
or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was
afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone
flames around him, one of the male milkers said--

"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind!
You should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to
the dairyman, but she was wrong.  A reply, in the shape of "Why?"
came as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had
been spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto
perceived.

"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the dairyman. "Though
I do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows--at least
that's my experience.  Once there was an old aged man over at
Mellstock--William Dewy by name--one of the family that used to do
a good deal of business as tranters over there--Jonathan, do ye
mind?--I knowed the man by sight as well as I know my own brother, in
a manner of speaking.  Well, this man was a coming home along from a
wedding, where he had been playing his fiddle, one fine moonlight
night, and for shortness' sake he took a cut across Forty-acres, a
field lying that way, where a bull was out to grass.  The bull seed
William, and took after him, horns aground, begad; and though William
runned his best, and hadn't MUCH drink in him (considering 'twas a
wedding, and the folks well off), he found he'd never reach the fence
and get over in time to save himself.  Well, as a last thought, he
pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a jig, turning to
the bull, and backing towards the corner.  The bull softened down,
and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who fiddled on and on;
till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face.  But no sooner
did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge than the
bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the seat of
William's breeches.  Well, William had to turn about and play on,
willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in the world, and 'a knowed
that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and tired
that 'a didn't know what to do.  When he had scraped till about four
o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and he
said to himself, 'There's only this last tune between me and eternal
welfare! Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.'  Well, then he called to
mind how he'd seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o'
night.  It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to
play a trick upon the bull.  So he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just
as at Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the
bull on his bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere the
true 'Tivity night and hour.  As soon as his horned friend were down,
William turned, clinked off like a long-dog, and jumped safe over
hedge, before the praying bull had got on his feet again to take
after him.  William used to say that he'd seen a man look a fool
a good many times, but never such a fool as that bull looked when
he found his pious feelings had been played upon, and 'twas not
Christmas Eve. ...  Yes, William Dewy, that was the man's name; and
I can tell you to a foot where's he a-lying in Mellstock Churchyard
at this very moment--just between the second yew-tree and the north
aisle."

"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when
faith was a living thing!"

The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice
behind the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference, no notice
was taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply
scepticism as to his tale.

"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no.  I knowed the man well."

"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind the dun cow.

Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's interlocutor,
of whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his
head so persistently in the flank of the milcher.  She could not
understand why he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman
himself.  But no explanation was discernible; he remained under the
cow long enough to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation
now and then, as if he could not get on.

"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman.  "'Tis
knack, not strength, that does it."

"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and stretching his
arms.  "I think I have finished her, however, though she made my
fingers ache."

Tess could then see him at full length.  He wore the ordinary white
pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his
boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his
local livery.  Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle,
sad, differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by
the discovery that he was one whom she had seen before.  Such
vicissitudes had Tess passed through since that time that for a
moment she could not remember where she had met him; and then it
flashed upon her that he was the pedestrian who had joined in the
club-dance at Marlott--the passing stranger who had come she knew
not whence, had danced with others but not with her, and slightingly
left her, and gone on his way with his friends.

The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident
anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest,
recognizing her also, he should by some means discover her story.
But it passed away when she found no sign of remembrance in him.  She
saw by degrees that since their first and only encounter his mobile
face had grown more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's
shapely moustache and beard--the latter of the palest straw colour
where it began upon his cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther
from its root.  Under his linen milking-pinner he wore a dark
velveteen jacket, cord breeches and gaiters, and a starched white
shirt.  Without the milking-gear nobody could have guessed what
he was.  He might with equal probability have been an eccentric
landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman.  That he was but a novice at
dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he had spent
upon the milking of one cow.

Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the
newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real generosity and
admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify
the assertion--which, strictly speaking, they might have done,
prettiness being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in
Tess.  When the milking was finished for the evening they straggled
indoors, where Mrs Crick, the dairyman's wife--who was too
respectable to go out milking herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in
warm weather because the dairymaids wore prints--was giving an eye
to the leads and things.

Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house
besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes.  She saw
nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on
the story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the
evening being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber.
It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the
sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same
apartment.  They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather
older than herself.  By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell
asleep immediately.

But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wakeful
than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various
particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered.  The
girl's whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy
mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they
floated.

"Mr Angel Clare--he that is learning milking, and that plays
the harp--never says much to us.  He is a pa'son's son, and is
too much taken up wi' his own thoughts to notice girls.  He is
the dairyman's pupil--learning farming in all its branches.  He
has learnt sheep-farming at another place, and he's now mastering
dairy-work....  Yes, he is quite the gentleman-born.  His father is
the Reverent Mr Clare at Emminster--a good many miles from here."

"Oh--I have heard of him," said her companion, now awake.  "A very
earnest clergyman, is he not?"

"Yes--that he is--the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say--the
last of the old Low Church sort, they tell me--for all about here be
what they call High.  All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made
pa'sons too."

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr
Clare was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell
asleep again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the
smell of the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured
dripping of the whey from the wrings downstairs.

Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct
figure, but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed,
abstracted eyes, and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and
delicately lined for a man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close
of the lower lip now and then; enough to do away with any inference
of indecision.  Nevertheless, something nebulous, preoccupied, vague,
in his bearing and regard, marked him as one who probably had no very
definite aim or concern about his material future.  Yet as a lad
people had said of him that he was one who might do anything if he
tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end
of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months'
pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being
to acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming,
with a view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as
circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a
step in the young man's career which had been anticipated neither
by himself nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a
daughter, married a second late in life.  This lady had somewhat
unexpectedly brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the
youngest, and his father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a
missing generation.  Of these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of
his old age, was the only son who had not taken a University degree,
though he was the single one of them whose early promise might have
done full justice to an academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott
dance, on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies
at home, a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller's,
directed to the Reverend James Clare.  The Vicar having opened it and
found it to contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up
from his seat and went straight to the shop with the book under his
arm.

"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked peremptorily, holding
up the volume.

"It was ordered, sir."

"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say."

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said.  "It was ordered by Mr
Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him."

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck.  He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.

"Look into this book, my boy," he said.  "What do you know about it?"

"I ordered it," said Angel simply.

"What for?"

"To read."

"How can you think of reading it?"

"How can I?  Why--it is a system of philosophy.  There is no more
moral, or even religious, work published."

"Yes--moral enough; I don't deny that.  But religious!--and for YOU,
who intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"

"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the son, with
anxious thought upon his face, "I should like to say, once for
all, that I should prefer not to take Orders.  I fear I could not
conscientiously do so.  I love the Church as one loves a parent.
I shall always have the warmest affection for her.  There is no
institution for whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I
cannot honestly be ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while
she refuses to liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive
theolatry."

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar
that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this!  He was
stultified, shocked, paralysed.  And if Angel were not going to
enter the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge?  The
University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man
of fixed ideas, a preface without a volume.  He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer--not as the phrase is now
elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and
out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:
one who could

              Indeed opine
        That the Eternal and Divine
        Did, eighteen centuries ago
        In very truth...

Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),
taking it 'in the literal and grammatical sense' as required by the
Declaration; and, therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state
of affairs," said Angel.  "My whole instinct in matters of religion
is towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the
Hebrews, 'the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things
that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'"

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting
ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used
for the honour and glory of God?" his father repeated.

"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father."

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like
his brothers.  But the Vicar's view of that seat of learning as a
stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so
rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to
the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and
wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his
father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out
this uniform plan of education for the three young men.

"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last.  "I feel that I
have no right to go there in the circumstances."

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing
themselves.  He spent years and years in desultory studies,
undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable
indifference to social forms and observances.  The material
distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised.  Even the
"good old family" (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy)
had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its
representatives.  As a balance to these austerities, when he went to
live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to
practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his
head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though
luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,
and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by
following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual
one.  But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable
years; and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life
as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead
in the right direction.  Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or
at home--farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the
business by a careful apprenticeship--that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he
valued even more than a competency--intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a
student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which
he could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the
dairy-house.  It could only be reached by a ladder from the
cheese-loft, and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived
and selected it as his retreat.  Here Clare had plenty of space, and
could often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the
household had gone to rest.  A portion was divided off at one end by
a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished
as a homely sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and
strumming upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when
in a bitter humour that he might have to get his living by it in the
streets some day.  But he soon preferred to read human nature by
taking his meals downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the
dairyman and his wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed
a lively assembly; for though but few milking hands slept in the
house, several joined the family at meals.  The longer Clare resided
here the less objection had he to his company, and the more did he
like to share quarters with them in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their
companionship.  The conventional farm-folk of his imagination--
personified in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as
Hodge--were obliterated after a few days' residence.  At close
quarters no Hodge was to be seen.  At first, it is true, when Clare's
intelligence was fresh from a contrasting society, these friends with
whom he now hobnobbed seemed a little strange.  Sitting down as a
level member of the dairyman's household seemed at the outset an
undignified proceeding.  The ideas, the modes, the surroundings,
appeared retrogressive and unmeaning.  But with living on there,
day after day, the acute sojourner became conscious of a new aspect
in the spectacle.  Without any objective change whatever, variety
had taken the place of monotonousness.  His host and his host's
household, his men and his maids, as they became intimately known to
Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a chemical process.
The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him: "_A mesure qu'on a
plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux.  Les
gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference entre les hommes._"
The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist.  He had been
disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures--beings of
many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene, a
few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stupid,
others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some potentially
Cromwellian--into men who had private views of each other, as he had
of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse or
sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or
vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the
road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake,
and for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed
career.  Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the
chronic melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with
the decline of belief in a beneficent Power.  For the first time of
late years he could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye
to cramming for a profession, since the few farming handbooks which
he deemed it desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and
humanity.  Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena
which he had before known but darkly--the seasons in their moods,
morning and evening, night and noon, winds in their different
tempers, trees, waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices
of inanimate things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire
acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by
Mrs Crick's orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at
their table, it was Angel Clare's custom to sit in the yawning
chimney-corner during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being
placed on a hinged flap at his elbow.  The light from the long, wide,
mullioned window opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a
secondary light of cold blue quality which shone down the chimney,
enabled him to read there easily whenever disposed to do so.  Between
Clare and the window was the table at which his companions sat, their
munching profiles rising sharp against the panes; while to the side
was the milk-house door, through which were visible the rectangular
leads in rows, full to the brim with the morning's milk.  At the
further end the great churn could be seen revolving, and its
slip-slopping heard--the moving power being discernible through the
window in the form of a spiritless horse walking in a circle and
driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly
reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by
post, hardly noticed that she was present at table.  She talked so
little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not
strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit
of neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general
impression.  One day, however, when he had been conning one of his
music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in
his head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled
to the hearth.  He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame
pirouetting on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking
and boiling, and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two
chimney crooks dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed
with soot, which quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty
kettle whining an accompaniment.  The conversation at the table mixed
in with his phantasmal orchestra till he thought: "What a fluty voice
one of those milkmaids has!  I suppose it is the new one."

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him.  Indeed, owing to his long silence,
his presence in the room was almost forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged
with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were
breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of
a gallows.

"What--really now?  And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the
grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by
fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds
and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to
want at all."

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his
wife.

"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer--hey?  To think o' the miles
I've vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or
trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least
notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar."

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the
dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was
only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her.  She soon finished her eating, and
having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace
imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the
constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he
said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,
something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,
before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray.  He
concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell.  A
casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been,
and he was not greatly curious about it.  But the circumstance was
sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other
pretty milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.

In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without
fancy or choice.  But certain cows will show a fondness for a
particular pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far
as to refuse to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a
stranger being unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these
partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise,
in the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was
placed in a difficulty.  The maids' private aims, however, were the
reverse of the dairyman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of
the eight or ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the
operation on their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a
preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having
become delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which
she had subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three
years, she would have been glad to meet the milchers' views in
this respect.  Out of the whole ninety-five there were eight in
particular--Dumpling, Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty,
Tidy, and Loud--who, though the teats of one or two were as hard as
carrots, gave down to her with a readiness that made her work on them
a mere touch of the fingers.  Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish,
she endeavoured conscientiously to take the animals just as they
came, excepting the very hard yielders which she could not yet
manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly
chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she
felt that their order could not be the result of accident.  The
dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of
late, and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyes, as she
rested against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in
making the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper
lip in spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower
lip remaining severely still.

"Well, it makes no difference," said he.  "You will always be here to
milk them."

"Do you think so?  I HOPE I shall!  But I don't KNOW."

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of
her grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her
meaning.  She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence
were somehow a factor in her wish.  Her misgiving was such that at
dusk, when the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to
continue her regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of
his considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in
such delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects
seemed endowed with two or three senses, if not five.  There was no
distinction between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close
to everything within the horizon.  The soundlessness impressed her as
a positive entity rather than as the mere negation of noise.  It was
broken by the strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head.  Dim,
flattened, constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed
to her as now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark
quality like that of nudity.  To speak absolutely, both instrument
and execution were poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened
Tess, like a fascinated bird, could not leave the spot.  Far from
leaving she drew up towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge
that he might not guess her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been
left uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with
juicy grass which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall
blooming weeds emitting offensive smells--weeds whose red and yellow
and purple hues formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated
flowers.  She went stealthily as a cat through this profusion of
growth, gathering cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that
were underfoot, staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime,
and rubbing off upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though
snow-white on the apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin;
thus she drew quite near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space.  The exaltation which
she had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star
came now without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the
thin notes of the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like
breezes through her, bringing tears into her eyes.  The floating
pollen seemed to be his notes made visible, and the dampness of
the garden the weeping of the garden's sensibility.  Though near
nightfall, the rank-smelling weed-flowers glowed as if they would not
close for intentness, and the waves of colour mixed with the waves of
sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in
the western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind
by accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere.  He concluded his
plaintive melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great
skill; and she waited, thinking another might be begun.  But, tired
of playing, he had desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling
up behind her.  Tess, her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if
hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low
tones reaching her, though he was some distance off.

"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he.  "Are you
afraid?"

"Oh no, sir--not of outdoor things; especially just now when the
apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."

"But you have your indoor fears--eh?"

"Well--yes, sir."

"What of?"

"I couldn't quite say."

"The milk turning sour?"

"No."

"Life in general?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ah--so have I, very often.  This hobble of being alive is rather
serious, don't you think so?"

"It is--now you put it that way."

"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see
it so just yet.  How is it you do?"

She maintained a hesitating silence.

"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly--

"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as
if they had.  And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your
looks?'  And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a
line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting
smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem
very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming!  Beware of
me!  Beware of me!' ...  But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your
music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"

He was surprised to find this young woman--who though but a milkmaid
had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the
envied of her housemates--shaping such sad imaginings.  She was
expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth
Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those
of the age--the ache of modernism.  The perception arrested him less
when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in
great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate
expression, by words in _logy_ and _ism_, of sensations which men and
women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so
young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.
Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that
experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration.  Tess's
passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family
and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a
mishap to be alive.  For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very
good reason.  But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have
descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of
Uz--as she herself had felt two or three years ago--"My soul chooseth
strangling and death rather than my life.  I loathe it; I would not
live alway."

It was true that he was at present out of his class.  But she knew
that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard,
he was studying what he wanted to know.  He did not milk cows because
he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a
rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder
of cattle.  He would become an American or Australian Abraham,
commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted
and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids.  At times,
nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly
bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately
to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were
respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge
of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into
each other's history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of
her nature, and to her one more of his.  Tess was trying to lead a
repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own
vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather
than as a man.  As such she compared him with herself; and at every
discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance
between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean
altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all
further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece.  She was
gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he
spoke.

"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.

"Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of
sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile.  "Just a
sense of what might have been with me!  My life looks as if it had
been wasted for want of chances!  When I see what you know, what you
have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!  I'm
like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible.  There is no
more spirit in me."

"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that!  Why," he said with
some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help
you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you
would like to take up--"

"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had
peeled.

"What?"

"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come
to peel them."

"Never mind about the lords and ladies.  Would you like to take up
any course of study--history, for example?"

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I
know already."

"Why not?"

"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row
only--finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody
just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me
sad, that's all.  The best is not to remember that your nature and
your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and
that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and
thousands'."

"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"

"I shouldn't mind learning why--why the sun do shine on the just and
the unjust alike," she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.
"But that's what books will not tell me."

"Tess, fie for such bitterness!"  Of course he spoke with a
conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not
been unknown to himself in bygone days.  And as he looked at the
unpracticed mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the
soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote.  She went on
peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the
wave-like curl of her lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on
her soft cheek, lingeringly went away.  When he was gone she stood
awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then, awakening
from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility
impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with
herself for her _niaiserie_, and with a quickening warmth in her
heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her!  In an access of hunger for his good
opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to
forget, so unpleasant had been its issues--the identity of her family
with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles.  Barren attribute as it was,
disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps
Mr Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect
her sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and
ladies if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in
Kingsbere Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that
she was no spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition
like those at Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by
asking the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county
families when they had lost all their money and land.

"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the most
rebellest rozums you ever knowed--not a bit like the rest of his
family; and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another
'tis the notion of what's called a' old family.  He says that it
stands to reason that old families have done their spurt of work in
past days, and can't have anything left in 'em now.  There's the
Billets and the Drenkhards and the Greys and the St Quintins and
the Hardys and the Goulds, who used to own the lands for miles down
this valley; you could buy 'em all up now for an old song a'most.
Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you know, is one of the
Paridelles--the old family that used to own lots o' the lands out by
King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore even he or
his was heard of.  Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke quite
scornful to the poor girl for days.  'Ah!' he says to her, 'you'll
never make a good dairymaid!  All your skill was used up ages ago
in Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git
strength for more deeds!'  A boy came here t'other day asking for
a job, and said his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname
he said he'd never heard that 'a had any surname, and when we asked
why, he said he supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long
enough.  'Ah! you're the very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping
up and shaking hands wi'en; 'I've great hopes of you;' and gave him
half-a-crown.  O no! he can't stomach old families!"

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.

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.

They met continually; they could not help it.  They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the
violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very
early, here.  Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came
the skimming, which began at a little past three.  It usually fell
to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,
and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep
though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently
upon her.  No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,
than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the
ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her
fellow-milkmaids.  By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was
downstairs and out in the humid air.  The remaining maids and the
dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did
not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same.  In
the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;
in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons
to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first
persons up of all the world.  In these early days of her residence
here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,
where he was generally awaiting her.  The spectral, half-compounded,
aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with
a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve.  At this
dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost
regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural
time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to
be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very
few in all England.  Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer
dawns.  She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along
together to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the
Resurrection hour.  He little thought that the Magdalen might be
at his side.  Whilst all the landscape was in neutral shade his
companion's face, which was the focus of his eyes, rising above the
mist stratum, seemed to have a sort of phosphorescence upon it.  She
looked ghostly, as if she were merely a soul at large.  In reality
her face, without appearing to do so, had caught the cold gleam of
day from the north-east; his own face, though he did not think of
it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply.
She was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman--a
whole sex condensed into one typical form.  He called her Artemis,
Demeter, and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not
like because she did not understand them.

"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer
bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and
shutters, out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at
the side of the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained
their standing in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by
moving their heads round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel,
like the turn of puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level,
and apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows
in detached remnants of small extent.  On the gray moisture of the
grass were marks where the cows had lain through the night--dark-green
islands of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general
sea of dew. From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which
the cow had rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of
which trail they found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when
she recognized them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid
the prevailing one.  Then they drove the animals back to the barton,
or sat down to milk them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like
a white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous
rocks.  Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and
hang on the wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails
subdividing the mead, which now shone like glass rods.  Minute
diamonds of moisture from the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes,
and drops upon her hair, like seed pearls.  When the day grew quite
strong and commonplace these dried off her; moreover, Tess then
lost her strange and ethereal beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes
scintillated in the sunbeams and she was again the dazzlingly fair
dairymaid only, who had to hold her own against the other women of
the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the
non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old
Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb!  Upon my soul,
if the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and
that's saying a good deal."

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in
common with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged
out from the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the
invariable preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape
accompanying its return journey when the table had been cleared.

Having arranged for the position of milkmaid at a dairy in Talbothays through a friend of her mother's, Tess leaves home for a second time. At 20, she is now more experienced in the world. It is late in the afternoon when she arrives at the dairy, and she is in time for the afternoon milking of the cows. She introduces herself to Mr. Richard Crick, the dairyman, and immediately begins work. In the milking parlor, Tess does not actually meet the other workers, but she hears them as they perform their chores. There is discussion among the other workers about some cows going "azew," or dry. Superstitiously, the workers believe that, because there is "a new hand come among us," the cows are not as likely to give as much milk. A tale from medieval times is told to entertain the workers, and a song is sung to make the work easier and to coax the cows to be generous with their milk -- all the kinds of banter one would expect in a milking parlor. Finally, a strange voice chimes in, and we are introduced to Angel Clare. Angel, at age 26, is the youngest son of an area parson; he has come to Talbothays to learn the business of the dairy farm so that he may one day become a farmer himself. Tess recognizes Angel from the May dance in Chapter 1. She fears that he will discover her past and shun her. Tess learns of Angel's past when she shares a room, which is over the milking room, with three other milkmaids. Hardy interrupts Tess' story to explain Angel's history. Angel hopes to have a farm of his own either in England or in an English colony. Angel's desire came as a surprise to his father, the Reverend James Clare, who learned of his youngest son's intentions only when books about farming were delivered to the Clare home. When his father questioned Angel about how he can be interested in such books when he plans to become a "minster of the Gospel," Angel informed his father of his plans, claiming that he cannot support all of church doctrine; he can only accept those tenants that he himself cannot bridge. Angel went to London to see the world and to discover a new profession for himself. In London, he fell in love with an older woman, who almost "entrapped" the young Clare in marriage. He was extricated from the situation and settled on farming as a profession. Tess and Angel's relationship starts off slowly, but begins to develop when he lines up Tess' cows for her, the ones that are hard to milk. The two later meet while Angel is playing a second hand harp for entertainment and a conversation ensues. Angel finds Tess rather mature, mysterious. Tess decries her lack of education, and Angel volunteers to tutor her in any subject she might choose. Tess replies, "I shouldn't mind learning why -- why the sun do shine on the just and unjust alike." Angel chides her for being so negative about life.

The dairy of Talbothays is in the Blackmoor Valley, on the river Froom/Frome. Hardy describes this region in breathtaking terms of green valleys and abundant life. "The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor . . . The Froom waters were clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist . . . ." To Tess, the job at the diary signifies a new beginning, so much so that she now begins a new phase of her life -- "she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation for her future." She fits right into the diary work and it suits her. In this sequence of chapters, Hardy introduces us again to Angel, who appeared briefly in Chapter 1. Angel's desire is to learn all he can through an internship, or apprenticeship, with an expert farmer. His training is practical, not like his two older brothers, both parsons, who were university trained at Cambridge. Angel has settled on farming in order to have "intellectual liberty." That is, he wants to be able to study and read what he wants, whenever he wants, and to pursue studies not related to the church. He comes to realize that the myth of the uneducated, simpleton farmer is not true. He sees the farm workers as his friends and regards them with high esteem. Through this changing perception, Angel "grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and humanity." The description of Angel in these chapters is significant in other ways: Angel Clare is a direct contrast to Alec d'Urberville. Angel makes himself aware of Tess in a slow methodical manner versus the abrupt, harsh forcefulness of Alec. Angel is well read, from a good family, and he does not regard his associates or colleagues with scorn. He uses his position of authority wisely, not to overpower his coworkers but to aid and assist them, unlike Alec who abuses his position over the servants of the house, using them for his own pleasures and whims. Angel is not opposed to working for a living, especially the hard life of a farmer. Angel seeks to better himself by furthering his own education, even offering to enhance Tess' education as his own expense. Angel is not perfect, however, as his relationship with an older woman in London suggests. Mr. Crick tells Tess how Angel views the aristocracy and the use of "old family names" as a means to establish dominance over others not so fortunate: "Oh no! he can't stomach old families!" Perhaps these views are not Crick's own but are part of Hardy's argument against establishment and order in Victorian England. It is interesting the comparison Hardy makes between Angel and his brothers. Angel is essentially a good man -- and remains a good man, despite his later inability to forgive Tess for her past and the bad decision he makes to leave her -- and we can admire his kindness, fairness, and strength. His brothers, on the other hand, although certainly not bad men, do not exhibit, the admirable qualities Angel possesses. Although this comparison will become more apparent in later chapters, Hardy begins it here, and in so doing, begins the revelation of Angel's character. What we know from the information about Angel's past is that he is his own man ; that he does not rely on family name to determine his own or others' worthiness ; and that he views others without the prejudices associated with his privileged class. Hardy describes Tess and Angel as "Adam and Eve" as it appears that they are the first and only people awake on earth . In describing the couple, Hardy uses these biblical references -- of Adam and Eve and Mary Magdalene -- to elevate the pair to a more heroic status. These allusions are interesting and significant in other ways: Mary Magdalene -- and by Hardy's analogy, Tess -- is identified with the repentant woman, specifically a reformed prostitute. Adam and Eve existed in a state of innocence in the Garden of Eden; their loss of innocence resulted in their loss of Paradise. Linking Angel and Tess with Adam and Eve  foreshadows the revelation and the events that destroy Angel and Tess' happiness. When Hardy says that life at Talbothays is quite good and that "Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now, possibly never would be so happy again," the reader can justifiably look to the coming action with foreboding. Glossary van Alsoot or Sallaert Seventeenth century Flemish painters of village life. psalter a version of the Psalms for use in religious services; here, Tess is thinking of the psalm that is part of the "Invitatory and Psalter" of the Daily Morning Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer. phlegmatic hard to rouse to action; specif., sluggish; dull; apathetic; calm; cool; stolid. milchers animals that give milk. Olympian shapes the shapes of the Greek gods, who lived on Mount Olympus. "pinner"  a pinafore or apron with a bib. cowcumber  cucumber. interlocutor a person taking part in a conversation or dialogue. vicissitudes unpredictable changes or variations that keep occurring in life, fortune, etc.; shifting circumstances; ups and downs. kex  a dry, hollow plant stem. nott cows  cows without horns. stave a set of verses, or lines, of a song or poem; stanza. tranters  carriers; hawkers. leads milk pans made of lead. wrings cheese processes. "to take Orders" to become an ordained minister. redemptive theolatry the worship of a god that promises redemption, as in Christianity. thimble-riggers cheaters or swindlers. Article Four the fourth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England asserts the literal resurrection of Christ from the dead. Hodge a familiar term for an agricultural laborer in England; shortened form of Roger. thought of Pascal's translated it means: "To the same degree as one has intelligence, one notices that many individuals possess distinctive qualities. People of an ordinary kind do not notice the differences between individuals." From the Pensees of Blaise Pascal , French philosopher and mathematician. "some mutely Miltonic, some potentially Cromwellian" an allusion to Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" . dusty death a phrase from Macbeth 5.5.23. apple-booth apple blossom. Valley of Humiliation from Part I  and Part II  of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. man of Uz Job. "My soul chooseth strangling . . . " Job 7:15-16. Peter the Great Peter I ; czar of Russia . Before becoming Emperor of Russia, Peter studied shipbuilding. Queen of Sheba queen who visited King Solomon to investigate his reputed wisdom: 1 Kings 10:1-13; here, a reference to the Queen's dispirited feeling after she experiences the wisdom and wealth of Solomon . "shine on the just and the unjust alike" an echo of the Sermon on the Mount . niaseries nonsense, foolish thought . convenances social conventions . Magdalene Mary Magdalene was a fallen woman. Christ's appearance to her after his Resurrection occurs in Mark 16. Artemis, Demeter goddesses associated with chastity, but the former also connected with hunting and both understood in the early anthropology of Hardy's time as fertility goddesses. barton barnyard.