aylight
coteries and green carpets wherein cattle form the passing crowd and
winds the busy hum; where a quiet family of rabbits or hares lives on
the other side of your party-wall, where your neighbour is everybody
in the tything, and where calculation is confined to market-days.
Of the fabricated tastes of good fashionable society she knew but
little, and of the formulated self-indulgence of bad, nothing at all.
Had her utmost thoughts in this direction been distinctly worded (and
by herself they never were), they would only have amounted to such a
matter as that she felt her impulses to be pleasanter guides than her
discretion. Her love was entire as a child's, and though warm as
summer it was fresh as spring. Her culpability lay in her making
no attempt to control feeling by subtle and careful inquiry into
consequences. She could show others the steep and thorny way, but
"reck'd not her own rede."

And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst
his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with
homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose
virtues were as metals in a mine.

The difference between love and respect was markedly shown in her
conduct. Bathsheba had spoken of her interest in Boldwood with the
greatest freedom to Liddy, but she had only communed with her own
heart concerning Troy.

All this infatuation Gabriel saw, and was troubled thereby from the
time of his daily journey a-field to the time of his return, and on
to the small hours of many a night. That he was not beloved had
hitherto been his great sorrow; that Bathsheba was getting into
the toils was now a sorrow greater than the first, and one which
nearly obscured it. It was a result which paralleled the oft-quoted
observation of Hippocrates concerning physical pains.

That is a noble though perhaps an unpromising love which not even the
fear of breeding aversion in the bosom of the one beloved can deter
from combating his or her errors. Oak determined to speak to his
mistress. He would base his appeal on what he considered her unfair
treatment of Farmer Boldwood, now absent from home.

An opportunity occurred one evening when she had gone for a short
walk by a path through the neighbouring cornfields. It was dusk when
Oak, who had not been far a-field that day, took the same path and
met her returning, quite pensively, as he thought.

The wheat was now tall, and the path was