To many persons this Egdon was a place which had slipped out of its century generations ago, to intrude as an uncouth object into this.  It was an obsolete thing, and few cared to study it.  How could this be otherwise in the days of square fields, plashed hedges, and meadows watered on a plan so rectangular that on a fine day they looked like silver gridirons?  The farmer, in his ride, who could smile at artificial grasses, look with solicitude at the coming corn, and sigh with sadness at the fly-eaten turnips, bestowed upon the distant upland of heath nothing better than a frown.  But as for Yeobright, when he looked from the heights on his way he could not help indulging in a barbarous satisfaction at observing that, in some of the attempts at reclamation from the waste, tillage, after holding on for a year or two, had receded again in despair, the ferns and furze-tufts stubbornly reasserting themselves.

He descended into the valley, and soon reached his home at Blooms-End.  His mother was snipping dead leaves from the window-plants.  She looked up at him as if she did not understand the meaning of his long stay with her; her face had worn that look for several days.  He could perceive that the curiosity which had been shown by the hair-cutting group amounted in his mother to concern.  But she had asked no question with her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he was not going to leave her soon.  Her silence besought an explanation of him more loudly than words.

“I am not going back to Paris again, mother,” he said.  “At least, in my old capacity.  I have given up the business.”

Mrs. Yeobright turned in pained surprise.  “I thought something was amiss, because of the boxes.  I wonder you did not tell me sooner.”

“I ought to have done it.  But I have been in doubt whether you would be pleased with my plan.  I was not quite clear on a few points myself.  I am going to take an entirely new course.”

“I am astonished, Clym.  How can you want to do better than you’ve been doing?”

“Very easily.  But I shall not do better in the way you mean; I suppose it will be called doing worse.  But I hate that business of mine, and I want to do some worthy thing before I die.  As a schoolmaster I think to do it—­a school-master to the poor and ignorant, to teach them what nobody else will.”

“After all the trouble that has been taken to give you a start, and when there is nothing to do but to keep straight on towards affluence, you say you will be a poor man’s schoolmaster.  Your fancies will be your ruin, Clym.”

Mrs. Yeobright spoke calmly, but the force of feeling behind the words was but too apparent to one who knew her as well as her son did.  He did not answer.  There was in his face that hopelessness of being understood which comes when the objector is constitutionally beyond the reach of a logic that, even under favouring conditions, is almost too coarse a vehicle for the subtlety of the argument.