 enough to break down his coldness even against his judgment.
Though unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not incomplete; and it would
have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had not instinctively known what an
argument lies in propinquity. Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this
failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of strategy, she said to
herself: yet that sort of hope she could not extinguish. His last representation
had now been made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly never
thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of possible offspring who would
scorn her was one that brought deadly conviction to an honest heart which was
humanitarian to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that, in
some circumstances, there was one thing better than to lead a good life, and
that was to be saved from leading any life whatever. Like all who have been
previsioned by suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme, hear a
penal sentence in the fiat, »You shall be born,« particularly if addressed to
potential issue of hers.
    Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that, till now, Tess had
been hoodwinked by her love for Clare into forgetting it might result in
vitalizations that would inflict upon others what she had bewailed as a
misfortune to herself.
    She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with the self-combating
proclivity of the super-sensitive, an answer thereto arose in Clare's own mind,
and he almost feared it. It was based on her exceptional physical nature; and
she might have used it promisingly. She might have added besides: »On an
Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to know or care about my misfortunes,
or to reproach me or you?« Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the
momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she may have been right.
The intuitive heart of woman knoweth not only its own bitterness, but its
husband's, and even if these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed
to him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears from his own
fastidious brain.
    It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk the odd paradox
that with more animalism he would have been the nobler man. We do not say it.
Yet Clare's love was doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to
impracticability. With these natures, corporeal presence is sometimes less
appealing than corporeal absence;
