The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary.  She knew how to hit to a hair’s-breadth that moment of evening when the light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute mental liberty.  It is then that the plight of being alive becomes attenuated to its least possible dimensions.  She had no fear of the shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—­or rather that cold accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with the element she moved in.  Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an integral part of the scene.  At times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her own story.  Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.  The midnight airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach.  A wet day was the expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy—­a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.  It was they that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she.  Walking among the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence.  But all the while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.  Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord.  She had been made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.

XIV

It was a hazy sunrise in August.  The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look, demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression.  His present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene, explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment.  One could feel that a saner religion had never prevailed under the sky.  The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.