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
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?"