Page:Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891 Volume 1).pdf/269

 remember that your nature and your past doings have been just like thousands’ and thousands’, and that your coming life and doings ’ll be like thousands’ and thousands’.’

‘What, really, then, you don’t want to learn anything?’

‘I shouldn’t mind learning why—why the sun shines on the just and on the unjust alike,’ she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. ‘But that is what books will not tell me.’

‘Tess, fie for such bitterness!’ Of course he spoke with a conventional sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpractised mouth and lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her lashes as they drooped with her bent gaze, lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an ebullition of displeasure with herself for her