Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like his brothers.  But the Vicar’s view of that seat of learning as a stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this uniform plan of education for the three young men.

“I will do without Cambridge,” said Angel at last.  “I feel that I have no right to go there in the circumstances.”

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing themselves.  He spent years and years in desultory studies, undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable indifference to social forms and observances.  The material distinctions of rank and wealth he increasingly despised.  Even the “good old family” (to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives.  As a balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life, and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual one.  But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years; and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the right direction.  Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at home—­farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the business by a careful apprenticeship—­that was a vocation which would probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued even more than a competency—­intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman’s.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the dairy-house.  It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft, and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it as his retreat.  Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone to rest.  A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely sitting-room.