It was as if people should laugh at martyrdom.
"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across the gully,
alighting beside her feet. "My wife--soon!"
"No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your sake, I say
no!"
"Tess!"
"Still I say no!" she repeated.
Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her waist the
moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of hair. (The
younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted with their hair loose
on Sunday mornings before building it up extra high for attending
church, a style they could not adopt when milking with their heads
against the cows.) If she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he
would have kissed her; it had evidently been his intention; but
her determined negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their
condition of domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such
disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it unfair to
her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which he might have
honestly employed had she been better able to avoid him. He released
her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and withheld the kiss.
It all turned on that release. What had given her strength to refuse
him this time was solely the tale of the widow told by the dairyman;
and that would have been overcome in another moment.
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