To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly _bizarrerie_,
a grim incongruity, in the march of these solemn words of Scripture
out of such a mouth. This too familiar intonation, less than four
years earlier, had brought to her ears expressions of such divergent
purpose that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the
contrast.
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former curves of
sensuousness were now modulated to lines of devotional passion.
The lip-shapes that had meant seductiveness were now made to
express supplication; the glow on the cheek that yesterday could be
translated as riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour
of pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism,
Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her form in
the old time with such mastery now beamed with the rude energy of a
theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those black angularities which
his face had used to put on when his wishes were thwarted now did
duty in picturing the incorrigible backslider who would insist upon
turning again to his wallowing in the mire.
The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had been diverted
from their hereditary connotation to signify impressions for which
Nature did not intend them.
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