Are you in want of anything?” he said gently. “No, sir,” she replied. “We are fairly well provided for.
You could see the skeleton behind the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton.
Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly... Her triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.
The ‘appetite for joy’ which pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the ride sways the helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over the social rubric.
Five years, nine months, and a few days. Fifteen months nearly have passed since he vanished, and is there anything so wonderful in an engagement of little more than five years?
That’s why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.
The fact is,” said d’Uberville drily, “whatever your dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your own part. That’s just like you women. Your mind is enslaved to his.
And the d’Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.
Here, in the valley, the world seems to be constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale...
O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!” she cried. “Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the child!
The tearful glimmer of the languid dawn’ was just sufficient to reveal to them the melancholy red leaves, lying thickly in the channels by the roadside, ever and anon loudly tapped on by heavy drops of water, which the boughs above had collected from the foggy air.
Ah, a time of his life shall come when he will have to repent, and think wretchedly of the pain he has caused another man; and then may he ache, and wish, and curse, and yearn – as I do now!
And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and cruel and as if they said, ‘I’m coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!
The rain stretched obliquely through the dull atmosphere in liquid spines, unbroken in continuity between their beginnings in the clouds and their points in him.
It was the first day of June, and the sheep-shearing season culminated, the landscape, even to the leanest pasture, being all health and colour. Every green was young, every pore was open, and every stalk was swollen with racing currents of juice. God was palpably present in the country, and the devil had gone with the world to town.
I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you: yea, who knoweth not such things as these?“ – Job xii. 3.
I wish I could say courteous flatteries to you,” the farmer continued in an easier tone, “and put my rugged feeling into a graceful shape: but I have neither power nor patience to learn such things.
I always saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my steps accordingly, or I shouldn’t have been the man I am.
The luminary was a golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with interest for him.
Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet – a rosy, warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of persistence in his consciousness.