 all the weathers to whose moods they had been
born, could resist equally well all the weathers by which they were surprised on
Brazilian plains.
    To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's sovereigns had been
spent she was unprovided with others to take their place, while on account of
the season she found it increasingly difficult to get employment. Not being
aware of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and willingness in any
sphere of life, she refrained from seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns,
large houses, people of means and social sophistication, and of manners other
than rural. From that direction of gentility Black Care had come. Society might
be better than she supposed from her slight experience of it. But she had no
proof of this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its purlieus.
    The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in which she had served as
supernumerary milkmaid during the spring and summer required no further aid.
Room would probably have been made for her at Talbothays, if only out of sheer
compassion; but comfortable as her life had been there she could not go back.
The anti-climax would be too intolerable; and her return might bring reproach
upon her idolized husband. She could not have borne their pity, and their
whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would
almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual there, so
long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the
interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness wince. Tess could not
account for this distinction; she simply knew that she felt it.
    She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of the county, to
which she had been recommended by a wandering letter which had reached her from
Marian. Marian had somehow heard that Tess was separated from her husband -
probably through Izz Huett - and the good-natured and now tippling girl, deeming
Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her former friend that she herself
had gone to this upland spot after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her
there, where there was room for other hands, if it was really true that she
worked again as of old.
    With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her husband's
forgiveness began to leave her: and there was something of the habitude of the
wild animal in the unreflecting instinct with which she rambled on -
disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past at every step,
obliterating her identity, giving
