Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of
her nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a
repressed life, but she little divined the strength of her own
vitality.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather
than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every
discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance
between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean
altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all
further effort on her own part whatever.
He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was
gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he
spoke.
"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.
"Oh, 'tis only--about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of
sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. "Just a
sense of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had
been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you
have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm
like the poor Queen of Sheba who lived in the Bible.
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