Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays 36. CHAPTER XXXVI (continued)

About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although he was a quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to get the dinner served by the time he should enter. He went first to the room where they had washed their hands together the day before, and as he entered the sitting-room the dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own motion.

"How punctual!" he said.

"Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.

The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual buildings--now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying himself through the evening with his papers. She feared she was in the way, and, when the old woman was gone, retired to the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she could for more than an hour.

Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work like this," he said. "You are not my servant; you are my wife."

She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. "I may think myself that--indeed?" she murmured, in piteous raillery. "You mean in name! Well, I don't want to be anything more."

"You MAY think so, Tess! You are. What do you mean?"

"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her accents. "I thought I--because I am not respectable, I mean. I told you I thought I was not respectable enough long ago--and on that account I didn't want to marry you, only--only you urged me!"