The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the
atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the
dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees.  Hot steaming rains fell
frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and
hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers
had gone home.  Tess and the other three were dressing themselves
rapidly, the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock
Church, which lay some three or four miles distant from the
dairy-house.  She had now been two months at Talbothays, and this
was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed
down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but
this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the
deluge, and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along
the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls
reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the
rain had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty
yards.  This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they
would have clicked through it in their high pattens and boots quite
unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun's-day, when flesh
went forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting
business with spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their
white stockings and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac
gowns, on which every mud spot would be visible, the pool was an
awkward impediment.  They could hear the church-bell calling--as yet
nearly a mile off.

"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!"
said Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had
climbed, and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of
creeping along its slope till they were past the pool.

"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else
going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!"
said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the
people staring round," said Marian, "that I hardly cool down again
till we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees."

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round
the bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing
along the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic
parson's son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes,
long wading boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head
cool, with a thistle-spud to finish him off.  "He's not going to
church," said Marian.

"No--I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of
evasive controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in
churches and chapels on fine summer days.  This morning, moreover,
he had gone out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was
considerable or not.  On his walk he observed the girls from a long
distance, though they had been so occupied with their difficulties of
passage as not to notice him.  He knew that the water had risen at
that spot, and that it would quite check their progress.  So he had
hastened on, with a dim idea of how he could help them--one of them
in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their
light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a
roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming
close.  Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable
flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in
the transparent tissue as in an aviary.  Angel's eye at last fell
upon Tess, the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed
laughter at their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance
radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long
boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who was in
front, including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come up so--"

"I'll carry you through the pool--every Jill of you."

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

"It is the only way for you to get past.  Stand still.  Nonsense--you
are not too heavy!  I'd carry you all four together.  Now, Marian,
attend," he continued, "and put your arms round my shoulders, so.
Now!  Hold on. That's well done."

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and
Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,
looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers.
They disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing
footsteps and the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were.
In a few minutes he reappeared.  Izz Huett was the next in order upon
the bank.

"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were
dry with emotion.  "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look
into his face as Marian did."

"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

"There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding.  "A time
to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now
going to be mine."

"Fie--it is Scripture, Izz!"

"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for pretty verses."

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a
commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz.  She quietly and
dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically
marched off with her.  When he was heard returning for the third time
Retty's throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her.  He went
up to the red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at
Tess.  His lips could not have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon
be you and I."  Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not
help it.  There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most
troublesome of Clare's burdens.  Marian had been like a sack of meal,
a dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered.
Izz had ridden sensibly and calmly.  Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,
and returned.  Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a
group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground.  It
was now her turn.  She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at
the proximity of Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contemned
in her companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of
betraying her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps--I can clim' better
than they.  You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

"No, no, Tess," said he quickly.  And almost before she was aware,
she was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

"They are better women than I," she replied, magnanimously sticking
to her resolve.

"Not to me," said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.

"O no.  You should lift Marian!  Such a lump.  You are like an
undulating billow warmed by the sun.  And all this fluff of muslin
about you is the froth."

"It is very pretty--if I seem like that to you."

"Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour
entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?"

"No."

"I did not expect such an event to-day."

"Nor I...  The water came up so sudden."

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to,
the state of breathing belied.  Clare stood still and inclinced his
face towards hers.

"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into
his eyes for her emotion.  It reminded Angel that he was somewhat
unfairly taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no
further with it.  No definite words of love had crossed their lips
as yet, and suspension at this point was desirable now. However,
he walked slowly, to make the remainder of the distance as long as
possible; but at last they came to the bend, and the rest of their
progress was in full view of the other three.  The dry land was
reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him,
and she could see that they had been talking of her.  He hastily bade
them farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence
by saying--

"No--in all truth; we have no chance against her!"  She looked
joylessly at Tess.

"What do you mean?" asked the latter.

"He likes 'ee best--the very best!  We could see it as he brought
'ee.  He would have kissed 'ee, if you had encouraged him to do it,
ever so little."

"No, no," said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and
yet there was no enmity or malice between them.  They were generous
young souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where
fatalism is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her.  Such
supplanting was to be.

Tess's heart ached.  There was no concealing from herself the fact
that she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from
knowing that the others had also lost their hearts to him.  There is
contagion in this sentiment, especially among women.  And yet that
same hungry nature had fought against this, but too feebly, and the
natural result had followed.

"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!"
she declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running
down).  "I can't help this, my dear!  I don't think marrying is in
his mind at all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him,
as I should refuse any man."

"Oh! would you?  Why?" said wondering Retty.

"It cannot be!  But I will be plain.  Putting myself quite on one
side, I don't think he will choose either of you."

"I have never expected it--thought of it!" moaned Retty.  "But O! I
wish I was dead!"

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned
to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

"We be friends with her again," she said to them.  "She thinks no
more of his choosing her than we do."

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose mood was
turned to its lowest bass.  "I was going to marry a dairyman at
Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but--my soul--I would put an end
to myself rather'n be his wife now!  Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day that he was
going to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast,
hoping and hoping, and never moved at all.  But he did not.  I don't
like biding here at Talbothays any longer!  I shall go hwome."

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the
hopeless passion of the girls.  They writhed feverishly under the
oppressiveness of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law--an
emotion which they had neither expected nor desired.  The incident
of the day had fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their
hearts out, and the torture was almost more than they could endure.
The differences which distinguished them as individuals were
abstracted by this passion, and each was but portion of one organism
called sex.  There was so much frankness and so little jealousy
because there was no hope.  Each one was a girl of fair common sense,
and she did not delude herself with any vain conceits, or deny her
love, or give herself airs, in the idea of outshining the others.
The full recognition of the futility of their infatuation, from a
social point of view; its purposeless beginning; its self-bounded
outlook; its lack of everything to justify its existence in the eye
of civilization (while lacking nothing in the eye of Nature); the one
fact that it did exist, ecstasizing them to a killing joy--all this
imparted to them a resignation, a dignity, which a practical and
sordid expectation of winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring
dripped monotonously downstairs.

"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett's voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian
suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed--

"So be we!"

"I wonder what she is like--the lady they say his family have looked
out for him!"

"I wonder," said Izz.

"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting.  "I have never
heard o' that!"

"O yes--'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his
family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter near his father's parish of
Emminster; he don't much care for her, they say.  But he is sure to
marry her."

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up
wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night.  They
pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the
wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and
veil, of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen
upon themselves as far as he and their love were concerned.  Thus
they talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow
away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that
there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare's attentions
to her.  It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own
temporary sake--nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad
conception was that she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way
to the rest, she who knew herself to be more impassioned in nature,
cleverer, more beautiful than they, was in the eyes of propriety far
less worthy of him than the homelier ones whom he ignored.

On Sunday, after milking the milkers travel to church in the rain. The lane leading from the parish has been flooded. While they cling to the bank, the girls find Angel Clare advancing toward them through the water. Angel asks the girls, avoiding Tess, whether they are going to church, and he vows to carry them through the flooded area. Tess is the final one to be carried, and she refuses, thinking that he must be so tired. Angel tells her that he carried the other girls so that he may get the opportunity to carry Tess. On the way to church, Marian remarks that the other girls have no chance against Tess, for Angel would have kissed her if she had encouraged him. Tess's heart aches, for there is no concealing the fact that she loves Angel Clare. That night, she vows that she will never stand in the way of Retty or the other girls. Izz tells Tess that a young lady of Angel's rank who supports him will marry Angel. After this disclosure Tess nourishes no further foolish thought that there lurks a grave import in Clare's attention to her, thinking that the love is a passing summer love for her face.

Tess continues to resist Angel Clare's advances in this chapter, although his declaration of affection for her is entirely without reproach. However, even if Angel behaves quite nobly to Tess and the other girls, even carrying them across flooded terrain and refraining from kissing Tess when he has the opportunity, he remains persistent. There is a great deal of inevitability concerning the romance between Angel and Tess; she cannot hide that she loves Angel, yet believes that his affection for her is only passing. Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary; Tess's belief that Angel only has a temporary affection for her is based not on Angel's behavior but instead on her own anxieties and experience with Alec, which has taught her of the inconstancy of men's affections. The test of whether or not Tess will declare her love for Angel is not whether Angel loves her, but rather whether Tess may accept his love

It's now July, and they've had a lot of rain. One Sunday morning, Tess and the other milkmaids decide to walk to church. On their way, they find that part of the road is flooded. It's not very deep, and on a working day they would have marched on across in their work boots. But they're wearing fancy Sunday shoes, and don't want to mess them up. Luckily for them, Angel happens to be out walking . He offers to carry them each across. Of course the girls all agree. The first three are all blushing and excited as he lifts them up. After all, this might be the only time they get to be in his arms. He saves the best for last, and carries Tess across slowly so that he can whisper to her. She still tries to flatter her friends to make them seem better than she is. He almost kisses her, but doesn't want to take advantage of the situation. After he leaves them all, Tess's friends look despondent. She asks them what's up, and they say that they're miserable because Angel likes her the best. But still, they don't hold it against her. Especially when Tess cries out that they're all better than she is. That night, as they're getting ready for bed, she cries and says that she'd never marry him, or any man. They all convince themselves that Angel has no idea of marrying any of them. Izz is so depressed that she says she'll leave the dairy and go home. Later on, Izz mentions that there's some fine lady that Angel's family wants him to marry. Tess is shocked, and for the first time, feels some jealousy. But she no longer has any hope that he might intend to ask her to marry him.


Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss
of fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love
should not grow passionate.  The ready bosoms existing there were
impregnated by their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state
of hearts at Talbothays Dairy.  The air of the place, so fresh in the
spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now.  Its heavy
scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying
in a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the
pastures, but there was still bright green herbage here where the
watercourses purled.  And as Clare was oppressed by the outward
heats, so was he burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for
the soft and silent Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry.  The wheels of the
dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands
of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire.  The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the
gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up
from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and
thrushes crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner
of quadrupeds than of winged creatures.  The flies in the kitchen
were lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted
places, on the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the
milkmaids' hands. Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while
butter-making, and still more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience,
without driving in the cows.  During the day the animals obsequiously
followed the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem
with the diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly
stand still for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to
stand apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge,
among them being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands
above those of any other maid.  When she rose from her stool under a
finished cow, Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time,
asked her if she would take the aforesaid creatures next.  She
silently assented, and with her stool at arm's length, and the pail
against her knee, went round to where they stood.  Soon the sound of
Old Pretty's milk fizzing into the pail came through the hedge, and
then Angel felt inclined to go round the corner also, to finish off a
hard-yielding milcher who had strayed there, he being now as capable
of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail.  But a few--mainly the younger
ones--rested their heads sideways.  This was Tess Durbeyfield's
habit, her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on
the far end of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation.
She was milking Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the
milking-side, it shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white
curtain-bonnet, and upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo
cut from the dun background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat
under his cow watching her.  The stillness of her head and features
was remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet
unseeing.  Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and
Tess's pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation
only, as if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating
heart.

How very lovable her face was to him.  Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation.  And
it was in her mouth that this culminated.  Eyes almost as deep and
speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as
arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen
nothing to equal on the face of the earth.  To a young man with the
least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red
top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening.  He had never before
seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such
persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with
snow.  Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand.  But
no--they were not perfect.  And it was the touch of the imperfect
upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was
that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he
could reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again
confronted him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an _aura_
over his flesh, a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced
a qualm; and actually produced, by some mysterious physiological
process, a prosaic sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would
not show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like
fixity disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that
the rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge
of it was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the
sky did not die down.  Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears,
fell back like a defeated battalion.  He jumped up from his seat,
and, leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a
mind, went quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down
beside her, clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness.  Having seen that it was really her
lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she
sank upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an
ecstatic cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.

"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered.  "I ought to have asked.
I--did not know what I was doing.  I do not mean it as a liberty.
I am devoted to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!"

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two
people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should
have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

"She is angry--she doesn't know what we mean--she'll kick over the
milk!" exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes
concerned with the quadruped's actions, her heart more deeply
concerned with herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her.  Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O--I don't know!" she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.

"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement.  "That I--love you dearly and truly I need
not say.  But I--it shall go no further now--it distresses you--I am
as surprised as you are.  You will not think I have presumed upon
your defencelessness--been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"

"N'--I can't tell."

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the
milking of each was resumed.  Nobody had beheld the gravitation of
the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened
nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that
the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere
acquaintance.  Yet in the interval since Crick's last view of them
something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for
their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the
dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based
upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of
so-called practicalities.  A veil had been whisked aside; the tract
of each one's outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward--for a
short time or for a long.

END OF PHASE THE THIRD

Phase the Fourth: The Consequence

The summer air is stagnant and enervating at the dairy now, as heavy scents weigh upon them. To Tess, Angel's face has a real vitality and warmth. Tess becomes aware that he is observing her. As they milk a cow, Angel finally jumps up and clasps Tess in his arms. She is taken completely by surprise, and yields to his embrace with unreflecting inevitability. He begs for forgiveness, but Tess merely says that the cow is angry and will kick over the milk. Tess begins to cry, but Angel declares that he loves her. Something occurs between them that changes the pivot of the universe for their two natures, something which the dairyman would have despised as a practical man. A veil has been whisked aside, for a short time or for a long.

What has been obvious yet never stated in the preceding chapters becomes explicit in this chapter, as Angel makes his first physical advance on Tess and professes his love for her. His declaration of love is abrupt and oddly out of place, for he kisses her as they milk a cow, yet is the culmination of the tension that has built between the two characters. Even when Angel kisses her, he does so as an expression of love and not, as Alec did, as an expression of simple lust. This declaration of love is a pivotal event, as Hardy comments, yet even here the happiness of there love seems incredibly short-lived. Hardy reminds the reader that Tess' and Angel's outlooks will have a new horizon, "for a short time or for a long," thus indicating that whatever change occurred will be a temporary one

It's hot and it's July: the weather conditions for falling in love are just perfect. It's so hot that everyone's feeling it. The cows are crowding around even the smallest trees, trying to stay in the shade. The dairymaids and dairymen do the milking out in the field, rather than herding the cows into the barnyard, because it's cooler and easier. Tess picks up her stool and goes to milk one of her favorite cows, which is standing at a distance from the main part of the herd. Angel starts milking a cow that's close to it, so that he can watch her. He sneezes, and Tess becomes aware that he's there, watching her. She blushes. He jumps up, and rushes to her and hugs her. She at first relaxes into the hug, and hugs him back, but the cow gets grumpy and stamps its feet and reminds Tess that she shouldn't be hugging anyone. Angel pulls back, and admits that he loves her, and apologizes for surprising her when he should have asked first. Tess blushes and doesn't say much, and they both go back to their milking.


Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.

The night was as sultry as the day.  There was no coolness after dark
unless on the grass.  Roads, garden-paths, the house-fronts, the
barton-walls were warm as hearths, and reflected the noontime
temperature into the noctambulist's face.

He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not what to think
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
opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by an unsympathetic
First Cause--her all; her every and only chance.  How then should he
look upon her as of less consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle
to caress and grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness
with the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her--so
fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve--in order
that it might not agonize and wreck her?

To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be to develop
what had begun.  Living in such close relations, to meet meant to
fall into endearment; flesh and blood could not resist it; and,
having arrived at no conclusion as to the issue of such a tendency,
he decided to hold aloof for the present from occupations in which
they would be mutually engaged.  As yet the harm done was small.

But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to approach
her.  He was driven towards her by every heave of his pulse.

He thought he would go and see his friends.  It might be possible
to sound them upon this.  In less than five months his term here
would have ended, and after a few additional months spent upon other
farms he would be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in
a position to start on his own account.  Would not a farmer want a
wife, and should a farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a
woman who understood farming?  Notwithstanding the pleasing answer
returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his journey.

One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays Dairy some
maid observed that she had not seen anything of Mr Clare that day.

"O no," said Dairyman Crick.  "Mr Clare has gone hwome to Emminster
to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."

For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine of the
morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled their song.
But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her blankness.  "He's
getting on towards the end of his time wi' me," added the dairyman,
with a phlegm which unconsciously was brutal; "and so I suppose he
is beginning to see about his plans elsewhere."

"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett, the only
one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her voice with the
question.

The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their lives hung
upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the tablecloth, Marian
with heat added to her redness, Tess throbbing and looking out at
the meads.

"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable unconcern.
"And even that may be altered a bit.  He'll bide to get a little
practice in the calving out at the straw-yard, for certain.  He'll
hang on till the end of the year I should say."

Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society--of "pleasure
girdled about with pain".  After that the blackness of unutterable
night.

At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding along a narrow
lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters, in the direction of
his father's Vicarage at Emminster, carrying, as well as he could,
a little basket which contained some black-puddings and a bottle of
mead, sent by Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents.  The
white lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but they
were staring into next year, and not at the lane.  He loved her;
ought he to marry her?  Dared he to marry her?  What would his mother
and his brothers say?  What would he himself say a couple of years
after the event?  That would depend upon whether the germs of staunch
comradeship underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a
sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of everlastingness.

His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor church-tower of
red stone, the clump of trees near the Vicarage, came at last into
view beneath him, and he rode down towards the well-known gate.
Casting a glance in the direction of the church before entering his
home, he beheld standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of
ages between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival of
some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure somewhat
older than the school-girls, wearing a broad-brimmed hat and
highly-starched cambric morning-gown, with a couple of books in her
hand.

Clare knew her well.  He could not be sure that she observed him; he
hoped she did not, so as to render it unnecessary that he should go
and speak to her, blameless creature that she was.  An overpowering
reluctance to greet her made him decide that she had not seen him.
The young lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his
father's neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day.  She was great at Antinomianism and
Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class now.  Clare's
mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped heathens in the Var
Vale, their rosy faces court-patched with cow-droppings; and to one
the most impassioned of them all.

It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved to trot
over to Emminster, and hence had not written to apprise his mother
and father, aiming, however, to arrive about the breakfast hour,
before they should have gone out to their parish duties.  He was
a little late, and they had already sat down to the morning meal.
The group at the table jumped up to welcome him as soon as he
entered.  They were his father and mother, his brother the Reverend
Felix--curate at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside
of a fortnight--and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down from
Cambridge for the long vacation.  His mother appeared in a cap and
silver spectacles, and his father looked what in fact he was--an
earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in years about sixty-five,
his pale face lined with thought and purpose.  Over their heads hung
the picture of Angel's sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen
years his senior, who had married a missionary and gone out to
Africa.

Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the last twenty
years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary life.  A spiritual
descendant in the direct line from Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an
Evangelical of the Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic
simplicity in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and admitted
no further reasoning on them thenceforward.  He was regarded even by
those of his own date and school of thinking as extreme; while, on
the other hand, those totally opposed to him were unwillingly won
to admiration for his thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he
showed in dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for
applying them.  He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated St
James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed feelings Timothy,
Titus, and Philemon.  The New Testament was less a Christiad then a
Pauliad to his intelligence--less an argument than an intoxication.
His creed of determinism was such that it almost amounted to a
vice, and quite amounted, on its negative side, to a renunciative
philosophy which had cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and
Leopardi.  He despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles,
and deemed himself consistent through the whole category--which in a
way he might have been.  One thing he certainly was--sincere.

To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural life and lush
womanhood which his son Angel had lately been experiencing in Var
Vale, his temper would have been antipathetic in a high degree, had
he either by inquiry or imagination been able to apprehend it.  Once
upon a time Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in
a moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better for
mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern
civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's grief was of that
blank description which could not realize that there might lurk a
thousandth part of a truth, much less a half truth or a whole truth,
in such a proposition.  He had simply preached austerely at Angel for
some time after.  But the kindness of his heart was such that he
never resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with a
smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.

Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did not so much
as formerly feel himself one of the family gathered there.  Every
time that he returned hither he was conscious of this divergence,
and since he had last shared in the Vicarage life it had grown even
more distinctly foreign to his own than usual.  Its transcendental
aspirations--still unconsciously based on the geocentric view of
things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell--were as foreign to his
own as if they had been the dreams of people on another planet.
Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only the great passionate pulse
of existence, unwarped, uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds
which futilely attempt to check what wisdom would be content to
regulate.

On their part they saw a great difference in him, a growing
divergence from the Angel Clare of former times.  It was chiefly a
difference in his manner that they noticed just now, particularly
his brothers.  He was getting to behave like a farmer; he flung his
legs about; the muscles of his face had grown more expressive; his
eyes looked as much information as his tongue spoke, and more.  The
manner of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man.  A prig would have said that he had
lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.  Such was the
contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the Talbothays nymphs and
swains.

After breakfast he walked with his two brothers, non-evangelical,
well-educated, hall-marked young men, correct to their remotest
fibre, such unimpeachable models as are turned out yearly by
the lathe of a systematic tuition.  They were both somewhat
short-sighted, and when it was the custom to wear a single eyeglass
and string they wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the
custom to wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles straightway, all
without reference to the particular variety of defect in their own
vision.  When Wordsworth was enthroned they carried pocket copies;
and when Shelley was belittled they allowed him to grow dusty on
their shelves.  When Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they
admired Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour
of Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any personal
objection.

If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he noticed
their growing mental limitations.  Felix seemed to him all Church;
Cuthbert all College.  His Diocesan Synod and Visitations were the
mainsprings of the world to the one; Cambridge to the other.  Each
brother candidly recognized that there were a few unimportant score
of millions of outsiders in civilized society, persons who were
neither University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.

They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were regular in their
visits to their parents.  Felix, though an offshoot from a far more
recent point in the devolution of theology than his father, was less
self-sacrificing and disinterested.  More tolerant than his father of
a contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its holder, he
was less ready than his father to pardon it as a slight to his own
teaching.  Cuthbert was, upon the whole, the more liberal-minded,
though, with greater subtlety, he had not so much heart.

As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling revived
in him--that whatever their advantages by comparison with himself,
neither saw or set forth life as it really was lived.  Perhaps, as
with many men, their opportunities of observation were not so good
as their opportunities of expression.  Neither had an adequate
conception of the complicated forces at work outside the smooth and
gentle current in which they and their associates floated.  Neither
saw the difference between local truth and universal truth; that what
the inner world said in their clerical and academic hearing was quite
a different thing from what the outer world was thinking.

"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear fellow,"
Felix was saying, among other things, to his youngest brother, as
he looked through his spectacles at the distant fields with sad
austerity.  "And, therefore, we must make the best of it.  But I do
entreat you to endeavour to keep as much as possible in touch with
moral ideals.  Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but
high thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."

"Of course it may," said Angel.  "Was it not proved nineteen hundred
years ago--if I may trespass upon your domain a little?  Why should
you think, Felix, that I am likely to drop my high thinking and my
moral ideals?"

"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation--it may be fancy only--that you were somehow losing
intellectual grasp.  Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"

"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good friends, you
know; each of us treading our allotted circles; but if it comes to
intellectual grasp, I think you, as a contented dogmatist, had
better leave mine alone, and inquire what has become of yours."

They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at any time at
which their father's and mother's morning work in the parish usually
concluded.  Convenience as regarded afternoon callers was the last
thing to enter into the consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare;
though the three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to
wish that their parents would conform a little to modern notions.

The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who was now
an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse _dapes inemptae_ of the
dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden table.  But neither of the old
people had arrived, and it was not till the sons were almost tired of
waiting that their parents entered.  The self-denying pair had been
occupied in coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,
whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned in the
flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.

The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold viands
was deposited before them.  Angel looked round for Mrs Crick's
black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely grilled as they
did them at the dairy, and of which he wished his father and mother
to appreciate the marvellous herbal savours as highly as he did
himself.

"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear boy," observed
Clare's mother.  "But I am sure you will not mind doing without them
as I am sure your father and I shall not, when you know the reason.
I suggested to him that we should take Mrs Crick's kind present to
the children of the man who can earn nothing just now because of his
attacks of delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great
pleasure to them; so we did."

"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the mead.

"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his mother,
"that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but as valuable
as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put it in my
medicine-closet."

"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle," added his
father.

"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.

"The truth, of course," said his father.

"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the black-puddings
very much.  She is a kind, jolly sort of body, and is sure to ask me
directly I return."

"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.

"Ah--no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."

"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.

"Oh--'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays," replied Angel,
blushing.  He felt that his parents were right in their practice if
wrong in their want of sentiment, and said no more.

That night, after Tess retires to her chamber, Angel goes outside, not knowing what to think of himself. Angel and Tess had kept apart since their embrace that afternoon. Angel is shocked to find how great the obscure dairy where he works means to him. To Angel, everything exists through Tess. Angel decides to discuss Tess with his friends, thinking that in less than five months his term at Talbothays will be over and after a few months at other farms he will be fully equipped in agricultural knowledge and in a position to start a farm himself. At that point he would want a wife who would understand farming. One morning Dairyman Crick tells his milkers that Angel has gone to Emminster to spend a few days with his family. Crick expects that Angel will not remain long at Talbothays. Angel returns home, where he finds near his father's church a woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat and attempts to avoid her. The young lady is Mercy Chant, whom his parents hoped would marry Angel. Reverend Clare is a clergymen of a type that had nearly died out, a spiritual descendant of Luther and Calvin, an Evangelical of Evangelicals. Among his family, Angel has become to seem more like a farmer and behaves less in the manner of a scholar. After breakfast Angel walks with his brothers, two men who wear whatever glasses are fashionable without reference to their affect on their vision, and who carry pocket copies of Wordsworth when he is fashionable, and Shelley when he is. His brothers notice Angel's growing social ineptness as he notice their growing mental limitations. At dinner that night, Mrs. Clare tells Angel that she has given away the black-pudding that Mrs. Crick sent as a gift to local children, while they will not drink the mead that Mrs. Crick sent, for it is too alcoholic and they never drink spirits at the table on principle. When Angel suggests that he will say to the Cricks that the family enjoyed the gifts, Mr. Clare insists that Angel tell them the truth.

Hardy once again frames a chapter from the point of view of Angel Clare, as he leaves Talbothays dairy so that he may speak to his parents about Tess. This visit to his family at Emminster serves to illustrate the origin of various character traits that Angel Clare possesses. The members of the Clare family, particularly the parents, hold very strict religious and moral views at the expense of courtesy or consideration; they even suggest that Angel voice the family's displeasure at the supposedly immoral gift that the Cricks sent the family. Furthermore, Reverend Clare has very strict expectations for Angel, particularly with reference to the type of women he will marry. Reverend Clare demands that Angel marry a woman such as Mercy Chant who has the proper religious beliefs; Hardy thus constructs an obstacle for the possible marriage between Angel Clare and Tess Durbeyfield. However, the obstacles that Hardy places concerning the romance between Angel and Tess in this chapter prove ephemeral. Hardy introduces the character of Mercy Chant as a possible rival, yet Angel professes no interest in her. Whatever religious objections that the Clares pose concerning Tess's beliefs soon fade as Angel convinces them that Tess certain has the proper belief systems. However, the possible obstacles that the Clares may pose to Tess fade quickly once Angel successfully argues his case. The relative ease with which Angel secures his parents' blessing for marriage does nevertheless contain some indication of future problems that the perpetually afflicted Tess will face. These obstacles will come in the form of Angel Clare himself and not from his family; the chapter establishes a family history of dogmatic beliefs and inflexibility. This once again shifts the possible obstacle to the romance back to Tess's family and personal histories. The one hope that Hardy allows exists in the contrast that he makes between Angel Clare and the rest of his family. Angel has come to bear less resemblance to his family than before his stay at Talbothays; the possibility for a successful romance between Tess and Angel thus rests on the degree to which Angel departs from his own family's characteristics

Angel wanders around that evening after Tess has gone to bed, thinking about what has happened. He hadn't meant to tell her he loved her--he hadn't meant to fall in love at all. But he's not toying around with her, either. He's got a conscience, and doesn't want to break any hearts. He decides to go home to see his folks for a few days, and talk it over with them. He's almost finished studying farming, and will soon be ready to start one of his own. He tells himself that it would make more sense to marry a woman who understands the business. But he decides to go see his parents anyway. The next morning at breakfast one of the girls comments that Mr. Clare isn't there. Dairyman Crick says that Angel has gone home to see his parents--probably to plan for the future, since he's almost finished his time at the dairy. Marian, Izz, Retty, and of course Tess all sigh and look sad at the news. Meanwhile, Angel is riding his horse towards his parents' house, thinking things over. Should he marry Tess? Would they be happy together? Does he really love her, or does he just have the hots for her? He's carrying a basket with some black puddings and a bottle of mead as a gift from Mrs. Crick to his parents. As he passes the church where his father preaches, he sees a young woman--it's Mercy Chant, the daughter of his parents' friend and neighbor. They hope he'll marry her someday. He decides she hasn't seen him, so he's not obliged to say hi. He gets to his parents' house just as they're all sitting down to breakfast. His brothers, Felix and Cuthbert, are there as well. Mr. Clare is an old man to have such a young son, and he's very set in his ways and thoroughly convinced that his way of viewing the world and religion is the right one. At least he's sincere about it, though. His family greets him, and Angel sits down to breakfast with them. They notice that he's lost some of his fancy polish--he's started to behave "like a farmer." After breakfast, he goes for a walk with his brothers. They might be noticing his lack of social graces, but he's starting to notice their closed-mindedness. Their parents, meanwhile, have gone out to do good work among the poor in their community, as they do everyday. At lunch, he looks around for the black puddings, but his mother tells him that they had given them to some poor folks. Angel then looks for the mead, and they tell him it was too alcoholic to drink at the table, so they've put it in the medicine cabinet with the brandy. Angel is disappointed--he likes both mead and black puddings, and wanted his family to enjoy them so that he could tell Mrs. Crick that her gift was appreciated.

CHAPTER 25 Summary Confused by Tess's reaction to his advances, Angel decides to stay away from her. Since it will be difficult to do so on the farm, he decides to go for a visit with his family for a few days. On his way home to Emminster, Angel analyzes his amorous feelings. He concludes that his love for Tess is genuine and decides to tell his parents about her. When Angel arrives home unannounced, his parents and two brothers are having breakfast. His brothers notice that Angel is greatly changed, seeming now like a farmer rather than a scholar. Angel also thinks that his brothers have changed, growing limited in their views of life. Felix, a curate in a neighboring town, can only focus on church matters; Cuthbert, a dean at Cambridge, can only focus on university matters. Notes This chapter contrasts Angel and his brothers. Staying and working at Talbothay's dairy has changed Angel. He is now much less a polished scholar and much more a country farmer, both in appearance and in thought. By contrast, his brothers lead much more sophisticated lives, one being a curate and one being a dean at Cambridge. But Angel feels their thinking has become very limited by their professions. He knows he no longer has anything in common with them other than his roots. It is important to notice the family's reactions to the gifts sent by Mrs. Crick. Her black pudding and mead have no place in their meal, for the family considers such plain country cooking to be unsuitable for consumption. Angel realizes that although his family is good in their religious duties, they lack real human sentiments. They cannot even appreciate the affection and love symbolized in Mrs. Crick's gifts


It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that Angel found
opportunity of broaching to his father one or two subjects near his
heart.  He had strung himself up to the purpose while kneeling behind
his brothers on the carpet, studying the little nails in the heels of
their walking boots.  When the service was over they went out of the
room with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.

The young man first discussed with the elder his plans for the
attainment of his position as a farmer on an extensive scale--either
in England or in the Colonies.  His father then told him that, as he
had not been put to the expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he
had felt it his duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might not feel
himself unduly slighted.

"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father, "you will no
doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a few years."

This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel onward to the
other and dearer subject.  He observed to his father that he was
then six-and-twenty, and that when he should start in the farming
business he would require eyes in the back of his head to see to all
matters--some one would be necessary to superintend the domestic
labours of his establishment whilst he was afield.  Would it not be
well, therefore, for him to marry?

His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable; and then Angel
put the question--

"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a thrifty
hard-working farmer?"

"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a comfort to you in
your goings-out and your comings-in.  Beyond that, it really matters
little.  Such an one can be found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend
and neighbour, Dr Chant--"

"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows, churn good
butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit hens and turkeys and
rear chickens, to direct a field of labourers in an emergency, and
estimate the value of sheep and calves?"

"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly.  It would be desirable."  Mr
Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought of these points before.
"I was going to add," he said, "that for a pure and saintly woman you
will not find one more to your true advantage, and certainly not more
to your mother's mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you
used to show a certain interest in.  It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the younger
clergy round about us for decorating the Communion-table--altar, as I
was shocked to hear her call it one day--with flowers and other stuff
on festival occasions.  But her father, who is quite as opposed to
such flummery as I, says that can be cured.  It is a mere girlish
outbreak which, I am sure, will not be permanent."

"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know.  But, father, don't you
think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous as Miss Chant,
but one who, in place of that lady's ecclesiastical accomplishments,
understands the duties of farm life as well as a farmer himself,
would suit me infinitely better?"

His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge of a farmer's
wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of humanity; and the
impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his father's feelings and to
advance the cause of his heart at the same time, grew specious.
He said that fate or Providence had thrown in his way a woman who
possessed every qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist,
and was decidedly of a serious turn of mind.  He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low Church
School of his father; but she would probably be open to conviction
on that point; she was a regular church-goer of simple faith;
honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent, graceful to a degree, chaste
as a vestal, and, in personal appearance, exceptionally beautiful.

"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry into--a lady, in
short?" asked his startled mother, who had come softly into the study
during the conversation.

"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady," said Angel,
unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's daughter, as I am proud to
say.  But she IS a lady, nevertheless--in feeling and nature."

"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."

"Pooh!--what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel quickly.
"How is family to avail the wife of a man who has to rough it as I
have, and shall have to do?"

"Mercy is accomplished.  And accomplishments have their charm,"
returned his mother, looking at him through her silver spectacles.

"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of them in the
life I am going to lead?--while as to her reading, I can take that
in hand.  She'll be apt pupil enough, as you would say if you knew
her. She's brim full of poetry--actualized poetry, if I may use the
expression.  She LIVES what paper-poets only write...  And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very tribe, genus,
and species you desire to propagate."

"O Angel, you are mocking!"

"Mother, I beg pardon.  But as she really does attend Church almost
every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian girl, I am sure you
will tolerate any social shortcomings for the sake of that quality,
and feel that I may do worse than choose her."  Angel waxed quite
earnest on that rather automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which
(never dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and the other
milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid beliefs essentially
naturalistic.

In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself any right
whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown young woman, Mr and
Mrs Clare began to feel it as an advantage not to be overlooked that
she at least was sound in her views; especially as the conjunction of
the pair must have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never
would have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice.  They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.

Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now.
He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents
were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of theirs, as
middle-class people, which it would require some tact to overcome.
For though legally at liberty to do as he chose, and though their
daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical difference
to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the
most important decision of his life.

He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in
Tess's life as if they were vital features.  It was for herself that
he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her substance--not for her skill
in the dairy, her aptness as his scholar, and certainly not for
her simple formal faith-professions.  Her unsophisticated open-air
existence required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him.  He held that education had as yet but little affected the
beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends.  It
was probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral
and intellectual training would appreciably, perhaps considerably,
elevate the involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he could see,
might be said to have affected only the mental epiderm of those
lives which had been brought under its influence.  This belief was
confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been
extended from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community,
had taught him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and wise woman
of another social stratum, than between the good and bad, the wise
and the foolish, of the same stratum or class.

It was the morning of his departure.  His brothers had already left
the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one
was to return to his college, and the other to his curacy.  Angel
might have accompanied them, but preferred to rejoin his sweetheart
at Talbothays.  He would have been an awkward member of the
party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there
was alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.  To
neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention Tess.

His mother made him sandwiches, and his father accompanied him,
on his own mare, a little way along the road.  Having fairly well
advanced his own affairs, Angel listened in a willing silence, as
they jogged on together through the shady lanes, to his father's
account of his parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother
clergymen whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of
the New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.

"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he proceeded to
recount experiences which would show the absurdity of that idea.
He told of wondrous conversions of evil livers of which he had been
the instrument, not only amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and
well-to-do; and he also candidly admitted many failures.

As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a young
upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty miles off, in
the neighbourhood of Trantridge.

"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and other places?"
asked his son.  "That curiously historic worn-out family with its
ghostly legend of the coach-and-four?"

"O no.  The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared sixty
or eighty years ago--at least, I believe so.  This seems to be a
new family which had taken the name; for the credit of the former
knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm sure.  But it is odd
to hear you express interest in old families.  I thought you set less
store by them even than I."

"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel with a
little impatience.  "Politically I am sceptical as to the virtue of
their being old.  Some of the wise even among themselves 'exclaim
against their own succession,' as Hamlet puts it; but lyrically,
dramatically, and even historically, I am tenderly attached to them."

This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was yet too
subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with the story he had
been about to relate; which was that after the death of the senior
so-called d'Urberville, the young man developed the most culpable
passions, though he had a blind mother, whose condition should have
made him know better.  A knowledge of his career having come to
the ears of Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country
preaching missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to
the delinquent on his spiritual state.  Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty, and
took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee!"  The young man much resented this
directness of attack, and in the war of words which followed when
they met he did not scruple publicly to insult Mr Clare, without
respect for his gray hairs.

Angel flushed with distress.

"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not expose yourself
to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"

"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the ardour of
self-abnegation.  "The only pain to me was pain on his account, poor,
foolish young man.  Do you suppose his incensed words could give
me any pain, or even his blows?  'Being reviled we bless; being
persecuted we suffer it; being defamed we entreat; we are made as the
filth of the world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this
day.'  Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are strictly
true at this present hour."

"Not blows, father?  He did not proceed to blows?"

"No, he did not.  Though I have borne blows from men in a mad state
of intoxication."

"No!"

"A dozen times, my boy.  What then?  I have saved them from the guilt
of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby; and they have lived
to thank me, and praise God."

"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently.  "But I fear
otherwise, from what you say."

"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare.  "And I continue to pray
for him, though on this side of the grave we shall probably never
meet again.  But, after all, one of those poor words of mine may
spring up in his heart as a good seed some day."

Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child; and though
the younger could not accept his parent's narrow dogma, he revered
his practice and recognized the hero under the pietist.  Perhaps he
revered his father's practice even more now than ever, seeing that,
in the question of making Tessy his wife, his father had not once
thought of inquiring whether she were well provided or penniless.
The same unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting
a living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in the
position of poor parsons for the term of their activities; yet Angel
admired it none the less.  Indeed, despite his own heterodoxy, Angel
often felt that he was nearer to his father on the human side than
was either of his brethren.

Angel discusses with his father his plans for attaining a position as a farmer in England or one of the Colonies. Reverend Clare feels that it is his duty to set up a sum of money for Angel, for he did not pay for him to go to university. When Angel mentions marriage, Reverend Clare suggests Mercy Chant, but Angel says that it would be more practical to have a woman who can work as a farmer. Angel mentions that he has found a possible wife, and Mrs. Clare asks if she is from a respectable family. Mrs. Clare insists on Mercy Chant, claiming that she has accomplishments. Angel claims that Tess is full of actualized poetry, and an unimpeachable Christian. Reverend Clare tells Angel a story about a young man with the last name d'Urberville, known for his rakish behavior. Reverend Clare had confronted him when he was preaching at another church, and the two nearly got into a brawl. Angel finds that he cannot accept his parents' narrow dogma, but he reveres his father's practice and recognizes the heroism under the piety.

In this chapter, Hardy continues to develop the established character traits of the Clare family. The discussion between Angel and his parents concerning Tess illustrates how little knowledge Angel actually has concerning Tess Durbeyfield. Angel speaks of Tess in abstract and idealistic terms, claiming that she is full of "actualized poetry" but unable to produce any direct evidence of her morality or accomplishments. Angel's exalted claims of Tess are ironic, for he praises Tess for an unblemished morality that contrasts starkly with her actual experience. Hardy includes an additional irony concerning the reappearance of Alec d'Urberville. This mention is not haphazard, but rather serves as a reminder of Alec's presence in the novel and foreshadowing his later return to prominence. This also illustrates the theme of fate that pervades Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Just as Angel met Tess by chance only to return to her life, the chance encounter between Reverend Clare and Alec d'Urberville suggests that Alec's role in the lives of Tess Durbeyfield and Angel Clare is not yet finished

Later that evening, Angel and his father are left alone together, and Angel seizes the opportunity to talk to his dad about his plans. His father tells him that, since he didn't pay for his college education like he did for Angel's brothers, he instead put aside that money for Angel to buy land with. Angel is appropriately grateful, and mentions that he might, you know, be thinking about getting married. His father agrees that marriage is great--provided it's to a saintly and devout Christian woman. Angel's father tries to push the Mercy Chant card, but Angel interrupts. Yes, yes, Angel says, but isn't it also important that she be good at farming? Angel's mother comes in, and says she hopes that the young lady in question is, in fact, a "lady"--someone he wouldn't be embarrassed to invite among polite, fancy company. He tells them all about Tess, emphasizing that she is a regular church-goer. They finally agree to meet her, and advise him to take things slowly. Even though Angel can legally do what he likes as far as marriage, he doesn't push the point. He goes back to the dairy to see Tess, and his father rides part of the way with him. His father tells him about his efforts to convert wealthy, party-animal types, and how he has often failed. One of the rich people Mr. Clare had been trying to work with was a Mr. D'Urberville. Angel perks up--he's heard of that old family, since their estates were close to the dairy, and knows something about their family history, including a ghost story about a coach and four . Mr. Clare says it's some new family that has adopted the old name. The original family died out more than sixty years before. Anyway, this Alec D'Urberville guy is a total jerk, and when Mr. Clare tried gently to point out the errors of his ways, Alec made fun of him in public. Angel gets upset on his father's behalf, of course, but his father takes it all in stride, and says he'll just keep trying.

CHAPTER 26 Summary In the evening, Mr. Clare tells Angel that he has saved the money not spent on Angel's Cambridge education. He is willing to give it to his son so that he may purchase some land to farm. They then talk about a suitable wife for Angel. Mr. Clare suggests that his son marry Mercy Chant, a wonderful Christian girl who is the daughter of a neighbor. Angel admits that he has someone else in mind, a young woman who is familiar with farming. His mother quizzes him about her social background, but Angel says it makes no difference in a farmer's wife. Instead, he praises the other virtues of his beloved Tess. In the end, his parents judge Tess to be inferior to Mercy and her many accomplishments, and Angel is sad at their prejudices. At the end of the discussion, his parents advise Angel not to rush into anything and agree to meet Tess in the future. When it is time for Angel to return to the farm, his father accompanies him for awhile. As they walk, Mr. Clare speaks of his successes and his failures. He is particularly bothered by the fact that a young man from the D'Urberville family has been remiss in his spiritual duties. When Mr. Clare confronted him, they argued. Mr. Clare feels like he has failed to influence this young man and continues to pray for him. Angel is upset about the treatment his father has received from the D'Urbervilles, and his dislike for such unscrupulous, historical families increases. The irony is obvious. Notes It is important to notice the difference between the attitudes of Mr. and Mrs. Clare towards Tess. She is concerned about Tess's social background, questioning if she is a lady. Mr. Clare is not worried about her wealth or social status; instead, he is totally concerned about her religious background. Angel tells his mother that social class is unimportant on a farm and assures his father of Tess's religious beliefs. Angel thinks to himself that he must work on Tess's religion and plans to give her appropriate reading material to enlighten her. Before she has ever agreed to marry Angel, he is already trying to change Tess, foreshadowing that there will be future problems in this relationship. It is obvious to the reader that the young D'Urberville whom Mr. Clare discusses is none other than Alec. It is ironic that Mr. Clare is praying for this young man and hopes that it will benefit Alec in the future. Angel's reaction to the discussion is also significant. He is disgusted over the young man's unscrupulous behavior and resents his wealthy family


An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through a garish
mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to a detached knoll
a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he again looked into that
green trough of sappiness and humidity, the valley of the Var or
Froom.  Immediately he began to descend from the upland to the fat
alluvial soil below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume
of the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed therein
a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to make the animals,
the very bees and butterflies drowsy. Clare was now so familiar with
the spot that he knew the individual cows by their names when, a long
distance off, he saw them dotted about the meads.  It was with a
sense of luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to him in
his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents, he could not
help being aware that to come here, as now, after an experience of
home-life, affected him like throwing off splints and bandages; even
the one customary curb on the humours of English rural societies
being absent in this place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.

Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy.  The denizens were
all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an hour or so which the
exceedingly early hours kept in summer-time rendered a necessity.
At the door the wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and peeled limb
of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of them ready and dry
for the evening milking.  Angel entered, and went through the silent
passages of the house to the back quarters, where he listened for a
moment.  Sustained snores came from the cart-house, where some of
the men were lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs
arose from the still further distance.  The large-leaved rhubarb and
cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces hanging in the
sun like half-closed umbrellas.

He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the house the
clock struck three.  Three was the afternoon skimming-hour; and, with
the stroke, Clare heard the creaking of the floor-boards above, and
then the touch of a descending foot on the stairs.  It was Tess's,
who in another moment came down before his eyes.

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there.
She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it
had been a snake's.  She had stretched one arm so high above her
coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above
the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung
heavy over their pupils.  The brim-fulness of her nature breathed
from her.  It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than
at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself
flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy heaviness,
before the remainder of her face was well awake.  With an oddly
compounded look of gladness, shyness, and surprise, she exclaimed--"O
Mr Clare!  How you frightened me--I--"

There had not at first been time for her to think of the changed
relations which his declaration had introduced; but the full sense of
the matter rose up in her face when she encountered Clare's tender
look as he stepped forward to the bottom stair.

"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm round her, and
his face to her flushed cheek.  "Don't, for Heaven's sake, Mister me
any more.  I have hastened back so soon because of you!"

Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply; and there
they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry, the sun slanting in
by the window upon his back, as he held her tightly to his breast;
upon her inclining face, upon the blue veins of her temple, upon her
naked arm, and her neck, and into the depths of her hair.  Having
been lying down in her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat.  At
first she would not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon
lifted, and his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and violet,
while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking might have
regarded Adam.

"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have on'y old Deb to
help me to-day.  Mrs Crick is gone to market with Mr Crick, and Retty
is not well, and the others are gone out somewhere, and won't be home
till milking."

As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander appeared on the
stairs.

"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards.  "So I can help
Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very tired, I am sure, you
needn't come down till milking-time."

Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly skimmed that
afternoon.  Tess was in a dream wherein familiar objects appeared
as having light and shade and position, but no particular outline.
Every time she held the skimmer under the pump to cool it for the
work her hand trembled, the ardour of his affection being so palpable
that she seemed to flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.

Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had done running
her forefinger round the leads to cut off the cream-edge, he cleaned
it in nature's way; for the unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy
came convenient now.

"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed gently.  "I
wish to ask you something of a very practical nature, which I have
been thinking of ever since that day last week in the meads.  I shall
soon want to marry, and, being a farmer, you see I shall require for
my wife a woman who knows all about the management of farms.  Will
you be that woman, Tessy?"

He put it that way that she might not think he had yielded to an
impulse of which his head would disapprove.

She turned quite careworn.  She had bowed to the inevitable result of
proximity, the necessity of loving him; but she had not calculated
upon this sudden corollary, which, indeed, Clare had put before her
without quite meaning himself to do it so soon.  With pain that was
like the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.

"O Mr Clare--I cannot be your wife--I cannot be!"

The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very heart, and
she bowed her face in her grief.

"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding her still more
greedily close.  "Do you say no?  Surely you love me?"

"O yes, yes!  And I would rather be yours than anybody's in the
world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the distressed girl.
"But I CANNOT marry you!"

"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are engaged to
marry some one else!"

"No, no!"

"Then why do you refuse me?"

"I don't want to marry!  I have not thought of doing it.  I cannot!
I only want to love you."

"But why?"

Driven to subterfuge, she stammered--

"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like you to marry
such as me.  She will want you to marry a lady."

"Nonsense--I have spoken to them both.  That was partly why I went
home."

"I feel I cannot--never, never!" she echoed.

"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"

"Yes--I did not expect it."

"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time," he
said.  "It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once.
I'll not allude to it again for a while."

She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and
began anew.  But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact
under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try
as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes
in the air.  She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two
blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
and dear advocate, she could never explain.

"I can't skim--I can't!" she said, turning away from him.

Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began
talking in a more general way:

You quite misapprehend my parents.  They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious.  They are two of the few
remaining Evangelical school.  Tessy, are you an Evangelical?"

"I don't know."

"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very
High, they tell me."

Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard
every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare's, who had
never heard him at all.

"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more firmly than I
do," she remarked as a safe generality.  "It is often a great sorrow
to me."

She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his heart that his
father could not object to her on religious grounds, even though she
did not know whether her principles were High, Low or Broad.  He
himself knew that, in reality, the confused beliefs which she held,
apparently imbibed in childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to
phraseology, and Pantheistic as to essence.  Confused or otherwise,
to disturb them was his last desire:

      Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
         Her early Heaven, her happy views;
         Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
      A life that leads melodious days.

He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.

He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his father's mode
of life, of his zeal for his principles; she grew serener, and the
undulations disappeared from her skimming; as she finished one lead
after another he followed her, and drew the plugs for letting down
the milk.

"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came in," she
ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the subject of
herself.

"Yes--well, my father had been talking a good deal to me of his
troubles and difficulties, and the subject always tends to depress
me.  He is so zealous that he gets many snubs and buffetings from
people of a different way of thinking from himself, and I don't
like to hear of such humiliations to a man of his age, the more
particularly as I don't think earnestness does any good when carried
so far.  He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in
which he took part quite recently.  He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of Trantridge, a
place forty miles from here, and made it his business to expostulate
with a lax young cynic he met with somewhere about there--son of some
landowner up that way--and who has a mother afflicted with blindness.
My father addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
was quite a disturbance.  It was very foolish of my father, I
must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when the
probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.  But whatever
he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in season or out of season;
and, of course, he makes many enemies, not only among the absolutely
vicious, but among the easy-going, who hate being bothered.  He says
he glories in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly;
but I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old, and
would leave such pigs to their wallowing."

Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth tragical; but
she no longer showed any tremulousness.  Clare's revived thoughts of
his father prevented his noticing her particularly; and so they went
on down the white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished
and drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took their
pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new milk.  As
Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to her softly--

"And my question, Tessy?"

"O no--no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one who had
heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the allusion to Alec
d'Urberville. "It CAN'T be!"

She went out towards the mead, joining the other milkmaids with
a bound, as if trying to make the open air drive away her sad
constraint.  All the girls drew onward to the spot where the cows
were grazing in the farther mead, the bevy advancing with the bold
grace of wild animals--the reckless, unchastened motion of women
accustomed to unlimited space--in which they abandoned themselves to
the air as a swimmer to the wave.  It seemed natural enough to him
now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from unconstrained
Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.

Angel returns to Talbothays, where he finds Tess, who has recently awakened. Angel tells Tess that he shall soon want to marry, and asks Tess if she will be his wife. Tess declares that she cannot be his wife, and she claims that the reason is that his father is a parson and his mother wouldn't want her to marry him. He counters these objections, telling her that he has discussed the matter with his parents. Angel then recounts the story that his father told him about Alec d'Urberville, not mentioning the actual name, and when he asks Tess about marriage once more she says that it cannot be.

Hardy shifts the burden of obstacles to the romance between Tess and Angel to Tess in this chapter, in which she refuses his proposal of marriage. Although Tess claims that it is her lowly status and the objections that his parents would make to her as the rationale for her rejection of Angel, the mention of Alec d'Urberville serves as a reminder that it is rather fear of her past that drives Tess to reject Angel. Tess views this as an insurmountable obstacle to her happiness; she cannot tell Angel about her past because he would reject her in turn, while she cannot keep it as a secret for he would inevitably learn of her more sordid history

When Angel gets back to Talbothays dairy, all the workers are taking their afternoon nap . The place seems deserted, and he takes care of his horse by himself. Tess is the first one to come down from her nap, and Angel startles her at the bottom of the stairs. He holds her tight, and she doesn't struggle away. They go off to the milk house together to skim the cream off the top of the milk--Dairyman Crick and his wife are off running errands, so it's just the two of them. Angel asks her to marry him, but she says she can't. He asks her reasons. She says it's because his parents wouldn't like it, and that it's too sudden. Angel tells her more about his parents--how they're simple and don't care about money. And then he tells her about his father preaching to some scoundrel named D'Urberville. Of course that gets Tess upset again, and she repeats that she can never marry him.

CHAPTER 27 Summary Shortly after returning to the dairy farm, Angel tells Tess that he would be delighted to have her as his wife. She confesses that she loves him, but does not accept his proposal. He coaxes her to tell the reason for her denial of him, and she says it is because of her unprivileged background and position. Angel tells Tess he will give her time to think it over. Angel also tells Tess about the Trantridge incident in which a D'Urberville insulted his father. She is quick to realize that the man being discussed is Alec. Tess is once again appalled at the cruelty of her fate. Notes In this chapter, Angel is pictured as impulsive. Upon returning to Talbothay's, he wastes no time in embracing Tess and asking for her hand in marriage. When she says she loves him but cannot marry him, Angel tries to be patient. He promises to give her time to reconsider his proposal and assures her that she should not be apprehensive about her background or his family. The narration of the Trantridge incident by Angel to Tess is a shocking event for her. She immediately realizes that the young man being discussed is Alec. Tess suddenly feels very vulnerable for the first time since she has been at Talbothay. She worries that her secret may not remain a secret with Alec's involvement with Angel's family. Once again Tess realizes the cruelty of fate