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TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES
XV
‘By experience’, says Roger Ascham, ‘we find out a short way by a long wandering.’ Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for farther travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess Durbeyfield’s experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?
If before going to the D'Urbervilles’ she had rigorously moved under the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it had not been in Tess’s power—nor is it in anybody’s power—to feel the whole truth of golden opinions when it is possible to profit by them. She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God
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