The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In
the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;
in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.
Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons
to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first
persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence
here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,
where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded,
aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with
a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this
dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost
regnant power, possibly because he knew that at that preternatural
time hardly any woman so well endowed in person as she was likely to
be walking in the open air within the boundaries of his horizon; very
few in all England. Fair women are usually asleep at mid-summer
dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest were nowhere.
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