for by its lord, the village cared for by
itself, and the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord
(in other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry, the
village of free- or copy-holders, and the absentee-owner's village,
farmed with the land) this place, Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.

But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral courage with
physical timidity, was now no longer a minor feature in Mrs Angel
Clare; and it sustained her.

The swede-field in which she and her companion were set hacking was
a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch, on the highest ground
of the farm, rising above stony lanchets or lynchets--the outcrop of
siliceous veins in the chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose
white flints in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half
of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the
business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the
root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also.
Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole
field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without
features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse
of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper
and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face
looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the
white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls
crawling over the surface of the former like flies.

Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a mechanical
regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in Hessian "wroppers"--
sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to the bottom, to keep their
gowns from blowing about--scant skirts revealing boots that reached
high up the ankles, and yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The
pensive character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian conception of
the two Marys.

They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the forlorn aspect
they bore in the landscape, not thinking of the justice or injustice
of their lot. Even in such a position as theirs it was possible
to exist in a dream. In the afternoon the rain came on again, and
Marian said that they need not work any more. But if they did not
work they