visible from the cottage door, was traditionally believed to be the
English Channel. She hated the change; she felt like one banished;
but here she was forced to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia's brain were juxtaposed the
strangest assortment of ideas, from old time and from new. There was
no middle distance in her perspective: romantic recollections of
sunny afternoons on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and
gallants around, stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of
surrounding Egdon. Every bizarre effect that could result from the
random intertwining of watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity
of a heath, was to be found in her. Seeing nothing of human life now,
she imagined all the more of what she had seen.

Where did her dignity come from? By a latent vein from Alcinous'
line, her father hailing from Phaeacia's isle?--or from Fitzalan and
De Vere, her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage?
Perhaps it was the gift of Heaven--a happy convergence of natural
laws. Among other things opportunity had of late years been denied
her of learning to be undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on
a heath renders vulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as
easy for the heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her.
A narrow life in Budmouth might have completely demeaned her.

The only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it
over is to look as if you had lost them; and Eustacia did that to a
triumph. In the captain's cottage she could suggest mansions she had
never seen. Perhaps that was because she frequented a vaster mansion
than any of them, the open hills. Like the summer condition of the
place around her, she was an embodiment of the phrase "a populous
solitude"--apparently so listless, void, and quiet, she was really
busy and full.

To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her the
one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.
And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more
than for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed
less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind,
the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she
dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth--that
any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in
the glass. She