"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said. "But we have had a

difference--" "Angel--is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of

trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her

son. "She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had sent him to

eternal hell there and then he would have told that lie.

"Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer things in

nature then an unsullied country maid. Any crudeness of manner which

may offend your more educated sense at first, will, I am sure,

disappear under the influence or your companionship and tuition."

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Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home to Clare the

secondary perception that he had utterly wrecked his career by this

marriage, which had not been among his early thoughts after the

disclosure. True, on his own account he cared very little about his

career; but he had wished to make it at least a respectable one on

account of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the

candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to shine on

sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the face of a dupe and

a failure. When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments incensed with

his poor wife for causing a situation in which he was obliged to

practise deception on his parents. He almost talked to her in his

anger, as if she had been in the room. And then her cooing voice,

plaintive in expostulation, disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch

of her lips passed over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air

the warmth of her breath.

This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was thinking how

great and good her husband was. But over them both there hung a

deeper shade than the shade which Angel Clare perceived, namely, the

shade of his own limitations. With all his attempted independence of

judgement this advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product

of the last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and

conventionality when surprised back into his early teachings. No

prophet had told him, and he was not prophet enough to tell himself,

that essentially this young wife of his was as deserving of the

praise of King Lemuel as any other woman endowed with the same

dislike of evil, her moral value having to be reckoned not by

achievement but by tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand

suffers on such occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without

shade; while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their

distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In considering

what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the

defective can be more than the entire.




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