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

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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.




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