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 part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece.  She was gathering the buds called “lords and ladies” from the bank while he spoke.

“Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?” he asked.

“Oh, ’tis only—­about my own self,” she said, with a frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel “a lady” meanwhile.  “Just a sense of what might have been with me!  My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances!  When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!  I’m like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible.  There is no more spirit in me.”

“Bless my soul, don’t go troubling about that!  Why,” he said with some enthusiasm, “I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like to take up—­”

“It is a lady again,” interrupted she, holding out the bud she had peeled.

“What?”

“I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to peel them.”

“Never mind about the lords and ladies.  Would you like to take up any course of study—­history, for example?”

“Sometimes I feel I don’t want to know anything more about it than I know already.”

“Why not?”

“Because what’s the use of learning that I am one of a long row only—­finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad, that’s all.  The best is not to remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’s and thousands’.”

“What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?”

“I shouldn’t mind learning why—­why the sun do shine on the just and the unjust alike,” she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice.  “But that’s what books will not tell me.”