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nydus/Tess of the d’UrbervillesPublic

A young woman of poor and uneducated parents is driven by guilt to try to redeem her family’s fortunes.

Page 216 of 565
Table of Contents

XXIV

“N’⁠—I can’t tell.”

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in the interval since Crick’s last view of them something had occurred which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures; something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities. A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one’s outlook was to have a new horizon thenceforward⁠—for a short time or for a long.

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