more little stroke of her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed life, but she little recked the strength of her own vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all further effort on her own part whatever.
He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was gathering the buds called ‘lords and ladies’ from the bank while he spoke.
‘Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?’ he asked.
‘Oh, ’tis only—about my own self,’ she said, with a frail laugh of sadness, fitfully beginning to peel ‘a lady’ meanwhile. ‘Just a sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When
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