After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad
that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family--even
though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle
and become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as
she, it seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the
d'Urberville vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she
bore. The insight afforded into Clare's character suggested to her
that it was largely owing to her supposed untraditional newness that
she had won interest in his eyes.
XX
The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of
flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral
creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had
stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and
inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and
stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams,
opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and
breathings. Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of
all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which
neediness ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin
to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness
makes too little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one
thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied
each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently
keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an
irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,
physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The
sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of
its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and
Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection
and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections
have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend
to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand
towards my past?"
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be
occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a
philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting
specimen of womankind.