on that offer themselves to everybody not in positive
pain; which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon
life as wider interests cursorily embraced.

Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself, insomuch that she thought
she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected
in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end
of the social world. Her position was, indeed, to a marked degree one
that, in the common phrase, afforded much to be thankful for. That she
was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience
had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful
honour of a brief transmit through a sorry world hardly called for
effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some
half-way point by daybeams rich as hers. But her strong sense that
neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did not
blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had
deserved much more. And in being forced to class herself among the
fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the
unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquility had been
accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that
happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.

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