The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the

service proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each

other. She knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart,

and felt that she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her

retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards

of thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets,

and successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length

almost everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it

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was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She

knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the

light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of

day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute

mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes

attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the

shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind--or rather that

cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is

so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece

with the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure

became an integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy

would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part

of her own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is

only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The

midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and

bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet

day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the

mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely

as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds

of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her,

was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy--a cloud of moral

hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they

that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking

among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits

on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she

looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts

of Innocence. But all the while she was making a distinction where

there was no difference. Feeling herself in antagonism, she was

quite in accord. She had been made to break an accepted social law,

but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such

an anomaly. XIV It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours,

attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated

fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they

should be dried away to nothing.




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