ing and dangerous.

She had not known that men could be so disinterested, chivalrous,
protective, in their love for women as he. Angel Clare was far from
all that she thought him in this respect; absurdly far, indeed;
but he was, in truth, more spiritual than animal; he had himself
well in hand, and was singularly free from grossness. Though not
cold-natured, he was rather bright than hot--less Byronic than
Shelleyan; could love desperately, but with a love more especially
inclined to the imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion
which could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.
This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences had been so
infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from indignation against
the male sex she swerved to excess of honour for Clare.

They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her honest faith
she did not disguise her desire to be with him. The sum of her
instincts on this matter, if clearly stated, would have been that the
elusive quality of her sex which attracts men in general might be
distasteful to so perfect a man after an avowal of love, since it
must in its very nature carry with it a suspicion of art.

The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors during
betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it had no
strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to Clare till he
saw how normal a thing she, in common with all the other dairy-folk,
regarded it. Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons
they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the
brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden
bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of
the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own
murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the
mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape. They
saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees and hedges, all the time
that there was bright sunshine elsewhere. The sun was so near the
ground, and the sward so flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess
would stretch a quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long
fingers pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted
against the sloping sides of the vale.

Men were at work here and there--for it was the season for "taking
up" the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter
irrigation, and me