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 turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it. It had blocked his way with the Church; it blocked his way with Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when he ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He waited till her sobbing ceased.

‘I wish half the women in England were as respectable as you,’ he said, in an ebullition of bitterness against womankind in general. ‘It isn’t a question of respectability, but one of principle.’

He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which warps direct souls, with such persistence when once their vision finds itself mocked by appearances. There was, it is true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally was, nothing that he could say made her