Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were

respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge

of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into

each other's history. Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of

her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a

repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own

vitality. At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather

than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every

discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance

between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean

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altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all

further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned

something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was

gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he

spoke.

"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.

"Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of

sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. "Just a

sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had

been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you

have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm

like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no

more spirit in me."

"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why," he said with

some enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help

you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you

would like to take up--"

"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had

peeled. "What?" "I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come

to peel them." "Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up

any course of study--history, for example?"

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I

know already." "Why not?"

"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row

only--finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody

just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me

sad, that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and

your past doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and

that your coming life and doings 'll be like thousands's and

thousands'." "What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"




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