 personal difference between being respected in the
nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social
world. Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the common
phrase, afforded much to be thankful for. That she was not demonstratively
thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience had been of a kind to teach her,
rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honour of a brief transit through a sorry
world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated
at some half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that
neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not blind her
to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more.
And in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to
wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken
tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed
to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of
pain.
 

                                     Notes

1 Most of these old houses have now been pulled down (1912).
 
2 These chimes, like those of other country churches, have been silenced for
many years.
 
3 The reader will scarcely need to be reminded that time and progress have
obliterated from the town that suggested these descriptions many or most of the
old-fashioned features here enumerated.

