, by words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women
have vaguely grasped for centuries.
    Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so young;
more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not guessing the
cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is as to intensity, and
not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal blight had been her mental harvest.
    Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family and
good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a mishap to be
alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good reason. But how could
this admirable and poetic man ever have descended into the Valley of
Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz - as she herself had felt two or three
years ago - »My soul chooseth strangling and death rather than my life. I loathe
it; I would not live alway.«
    It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that was
only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard, he was studying what
he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was obliged to milk cows, but
because he was learning how to be a rich and prosperous dairyman, landowner,
agriculturist, and breeder of cattle. He would become an American or Australian
Abraham, commanding like a monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his
ring-straked, his men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did
seem unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young man
should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a clergyman, like his
father and brothers.
    Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively
puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's
character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history.
 
Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her nature, and
to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little
divined the strength of her own vitality.
    At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as
a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of the
abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental
standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she became quite
dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own