 in useless grooves through unheeding
the comprehension.
    He was a fairly well-educated man for one of middle class - exceptionally
well educated for a common soldier. He spoke fluently and unceasingly. He could
in this way be one thing and seem another; for instance, he could speak of love
and think of dinner; call on the husband to look at the wife; be eager to pay
and intend to owe.
    The wondrous power of flattery in passados at woman is a perception so
universal as to be remarked upon by many people almost as automatically as they
repeat a proverb, or say that they are Christians and the like, without thinking
much of the enormous corollaries which spring from the proposition. Still less
is it acted upon for the good of the complemental being alluded to. With the
majority such an opinion is shelved with all those trite aphorisms which require
some catastrophe to bring their tremendous meanings thoroughly home. When
expressed with some amount of reflectiveness it seems co-ordinate with a belief
that this flattery must be reasonable to be effective. It is to the credit of
men that few attempt to settle the question by experiment, and it is for their
happiness, perhaps, that accident has never settled it for them. Nevertheless,
that a male dissembler who by deluging her with untenable fictions charms the
female wisely, may acquire powers reaching to the extremity of perdition, is a
truth taught to many by unsought and wringing occurrences. And some profess to
have attained to the same knowledge by experiment as aforesaid, and jauntily
continue their indulgence in such experiments with terrible effect. Sergeant
Troy was one.
    He had been known to observe casually that in dealing with womankind the
only alternative to flattery was cursing and swearing. There was no third
method. »Treat them fairly, and you are a lost man,« he would say.
    This philosopher's public appearance in Weatherbury promptly followed his
arrival there. A week or two after the shearing Bathsheba, feeling a nameless
relief of spirits on account of Boldwood's absence, approached her hayfields and
looked over the hedge towards the haymakers. They consisted in about equal
proportions of gnarled and flexuous forms, the former being the men, the latter
the women, who wore tilt bonnets covered with nankeen, which hung in a curtain
upon their shoulders. Coggan and Mark Cark were mowing in a less forward meadow,
Clark humming a tune to the strokes of his scythe, to which Jan made no attempt
to keep time with his. In the first mead they were already loading hay, the
women raking it into cocks and windrows, and the men tossing it
