Page:Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891 Volume 1).pdf/175

 Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of vexation. ‘After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here, who would have expected it to end like this! Why didn’t ye think of doing some good for your family instead o’ thinking only of yourself? See how I’ve got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with his heart clogged like a dripping-pan. I did hope for something to come out o’ this! To see what a pretty pair you and he made that day when you drove away together four months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we thought, because we were his kin. But if he’s not, it must have been done because of his love for ’ee. And yet you’ve not got him to marry!’

Get Alec D’Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry her! On matrimony he had never once said a word. And what if he had? How she might have been impelled to answer him by a crude snatching at social salvation she could not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew her feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the circumstances, unnatural, unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as she had said, was what made her detest herself. She had