 have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice.
They said finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that they would
not object to see her.
    Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars now. He felt that,
single-minded and self-sacrificing as his parents were, there yet existed
certain latent prejudices of theirs, as middle-class people, which it would
require some tact to overcome. For though legally at liberty to do as he chose,
and though their daughter-in-law's qualifications could make no practical
difference to their lives, in the probability of her living far away from them,
he wished for affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the most
important decision of his life.
    He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon accidents in Tess's
life as if they were vital features. It was for herself that he loved Tess; her
soul, her heart, her substance - not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as
his scholar, and certainly not for her simple formal faith-professions. Her
unsophisticated open-air existence required no varnish of conventionality to
make it palatable to him. He held that education had as yet but little affected
the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic happiness depends. It was
probable that, in the lapse of ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual
training would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the involuntary and
even the unconscious instincts of human nature; but up to the present day
culture, as far as he could see, might be said to have affected only the mental
epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its influence. This belief
was confirmed by his experience of women, which, having latterly been extended
from the cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught him how
much less was the intrinsic difference between the good and wise woman of one
social stratum and the good and wise woman of another social stratum, than
between the good and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or
class.
    It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had already left the
vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in the north, whence one was to return to
his college, and the other to his curacy. Angel might have accompanied them, but
preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays. He would have been an awkward
member of the party; for, though the most appreciative humanist, the most ideal
religionist, even the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was
alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness would
