Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed in relation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, very original.  Her instincts towards social non-comformity were at the root of this.  In the matter of holidays, her mood was that of horses who, when turned out to grass, enjoy looking upon their kind at work on the highway.  She only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst of other people’s labour.  Hence she hated Sundays when all was at rest, and often said they would be the death of her.  To see the heathmen in their Sunday condition, that is, with their hands in their pockets, their boots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign), walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her.  To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather’s old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while.  But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a week-day that she read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her duty.

Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of her situation upon her nature.  To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue.  The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours.  An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressible glory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for no meaner union.  Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation.  To have lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind that, though disappointed, forswears compromise.  But, if congenial to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth.  In a world where doing means marrying, and the commonwealth is one of hearts and hands, the same peril attends the condition.

And so we see our Eustacia—­for at times she was not altogether unlovable—­arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels that nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her existence by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object.  This was the sole reason of his ascendency:  she knew it herself.  At moments her pride rebelled against her passion for him, and she even had longed to be free.  But there was only one circumstance which could dislodge him, and that was the advent of a greater man.