"Yes. I never really doubted--never, never!"
So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle inside the
sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the rain driving against
them. She had consented. She might as well have agreed at first.
The "appetite for joy" which pervades all creation, that tremendous
force which sways humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the
helpless weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over
the social rubric.
"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my doing
that?"
"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess, not to know
how very proper it is to write to your mother at such a time, and how
wrong it would be in me to object. Where does she live?"
"At the same place--Marlott. On the further side of Blackmoor Vale."
"Ah, then I HAVE seen you before this summer--"
"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance with me.
O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"
XXXI
Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her mother the very
next day, and by the end of the week a response to her communication
arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's wandering last-century hand.
DEAR TESS,--
J write these few lines Hoping they will find you well,
as they leave me at Present, thank God for it.
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