The season developed and matured. Another year’s instalment of flowers, leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures, took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles. Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked out scents in invisible jets and breathings.
That the party was intended to be a truly jovial one there was no room for doubt.
After wearing and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illumined her. She felt that she would do well to be useful again – to taste anew sweet independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over them;.
Gabriel’s malignant star was assuredly setting fast.
Perhaps in no minor point does a woman astonish her helpmate more than in the strange power she possesses of believing cajoleries that she knows to be false – except indeed in that of being utterly skeptical on strictures that she knows to be true.
Geoffrey’s own heart felt inconveniently large just then.
She could have never believed in the morning that her colorless inner world would before night become as animated as water under a microscope.
They seemed, like himself, to be living in a world which did not want them.
Boldwood, whose unreasoning devotion to Bathsheba could only be characterized as a fond madness which neither time nor circumstance, evil nor good report, could weaken or destroy. This fevered hope had grown up again like a grain of mustard-seed during the quiet which followed the hasty conjecture that Troy was drowned. He nourished it fearfully, and almost shunned the contemplation of it in earnest, lest facts should reveal the wildness of the dream. Bathsheba having at last been persuaded.
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 only communed with her own heart concerning Troy.
But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess’s fancy – a cloud of moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason.
Emotions would be half starved if there were no candle-light.
Your husband, my dear, is, I make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord, if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this weather hurts your beauty at all – in fact, it rather does it good.
She is a bold and passionate woman, fighting to earn respect as a farm owner and over the course of the novel she has to endure much suffering, which enhances her better qualities while diminishing some elements of her less admirable traits.
As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving against depression without, and not quite succeeding. The look suggested issolation, but it revealed something more. As Usual with bright natures, the deity that lies ignominiously chained within a ephemeral human carcase shone out of him like a ray.
I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn’t keep on thinking they’d be all withered in a few days!
It depends entirely upon what is meant by being truly great. But the long and the short of the matter is, that men must stick to a thing if they want to succeed in it – not giving way to over-much admiration for the flowers they see growing in other people’s borders; which I am afraid has been my case.′ He looked into the far distance and paused.
Fancies find room in the strongest minds. Here, in a churchyard old as civilization, in the worst of weathers, was a strange woman of curious fascinations never seen elsewhere: there might be some devilry about her presence.
He was at the brightest period of masculine growth, for his intellect and his emotions were clearly separated: he had passed the time during which the influence of youth indiscriminately mingles them in the character of impulse, and he had not yet arrived at the stage wherein they become united again, in the character of prejudice, by the influence of a wife and family.
But man, even to himself, is a palimpsest, having an ostensible writing, and another beneath the lines.