Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of
all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which
neediness ends, and below the line at which the _convenances_ begin
to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness
makes too little of enough.
Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one
thing aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied
each other, ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently
keeping out of it. All the while they were converging, under an
irresistible law, as surely as two streams in one vale.
Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,
physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The
sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of
its sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and
Clare also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection
and love; where no profundities have been reached; no reflections
have set in, awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend
to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand
towards my past?"
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.
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