Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of black velvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way which added much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding her forehead.  “Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrow band drawn over the brow,” says Richter.  Some of the neighbouring girls wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallic ornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and metallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath?  Budmouth was her native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date.  She was the daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered there—­a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician—­who met his future wife during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of good family.  The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man’s wishes, for the bandmaster’s pockets were as light as his occupation.  But the musician did his best; adopted his wife’s name, made England permanently his home, took great trouble with his child’s education, the expenses of which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as the chief local musician till her mother’s death, when he left off thriving, drank, and died also.  The girl was left to the care of her grandfather, who, since three of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck, had lived in this airy perch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy because the house was to be had for next to nothing, and because a remote blue tinge on the horizon between the hills, visible from the cottage door, was traditionally believed to be the English Channel.  She hated the change; she felt like one banished; but here she was forced to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia’s brain were juxtaposed the strangest assortment of ideas, from old time and from new.  There was no middle distance in her perspective:  romantic recollections of sunny afternoons on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around, stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon.  Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining of watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be found in her.  Seeing nothing of human life now, she imagined all the more of what she had seen.

Where did her dignity come from?  By a latent vein from Alcinous’ line, her father hailing from Phaeacia’s isle?—­or from Fitzalan and De Vere, her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage?  Perhaps it was the gift of Heaven—­a happy convergence of natural laws.  Among other things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be undignified, for she lived lonely.  Isolation on a heath renders vulgarity well-nigh impossible.  It would have been as easy for the heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her.  A narrow life in Budmouth might have completely demeaned her.