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

"Well--yes, sir."

"What of?"

"I couldn't quite say."

"The milk turning sour?"

"No."

"Life in general?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ah--so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather

serious, don't you think so?"

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

"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see

it so just yet. How is it you do?"

She maintained a hesitating silence.

"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."

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

replied shyly-"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?--that is, seem as

if they had. And the river says,--'Why do ye trouble me with your

looks?' And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a

line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting

smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem

very fierce and cruel and as if they said, 'I'm coming! Beware of

me! Beware of me!' ... But YOU, sir, can raise up dreams with your

music, and drive all such horrid fancies away!"

He was surprised to find this young woman--who though but a milkmaid

had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the

envied of her housemates--shaping such sad imaginings. She was

expressing in her own native phrases--assisted a little by her Sixth

Standard training--feelings which might almost have been called those

of the age--the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less

when he reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in

great part but the latest fashion in definition--a more accurate

expression, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and

women have vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so

young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic.

Not guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that

experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's

passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family

and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a

mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very

good reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have

descended into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of

Uz--as she herself had felt two or three years ago--"My soul chooseth

strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not

live alway." It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew

that was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard,

he was studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because

he was obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a

rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder

of cattle. He would become an American or Australian Abraham,

commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted

and his ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times,

nevertheless, it did seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly

bookish, musical, thinking young man should have chosen deliberately

to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his father and brothers.




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