“A little more than persuading had to do wi’ the coming o’t, I reckon.  There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase; and it mid ha’ gone hard wi’ a certain party if folks had come along.”

“Well, a little more, or a little less, ’twas a thousand pities that it should have happened to she, of all others.  But ’tis always the comeliest!  The plain ones be as safe as churches—­hey, Jenny?” The speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises—­shade behind shade—­tint beyond tint—­around pupils that had no bottom; an almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the fields this week for the first time during many months.  After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her.  She felt that she would do well to be useful again—­to taste anew sweet independence at any price.  The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.  Meanwhile the trees were just as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as ever.  The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief, nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—­the thought of the world’s concern at her situation—­was founded on an illusion.  She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.  To all humankind besides, Tess was only a passing thought.  Even to friends she was no more than a frequently passing thought.  If she made herself miserable the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—­“Ah, she makes herself unhappy.”  If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be this idea to them—­“Ah, she bears it very well.”  Moreover, alone in a desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to her?  Not greatly.  If she could have been but just created, to discover herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to despair?  No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure therein.  Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.