lking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots
they had cut during the week, and kicking them critically as if
their use were unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her. To relieve
the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards
containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming
Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while. But on
Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always
on a week-day that she read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed
with a sense of doing her duty.

Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of her
situation upon her nature. To dwell on a heath without studying its
meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue.
The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only
caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented
woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist,
even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressible
glory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for
no meaner union. Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To
have lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to
have acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur
of temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it
denotes a mind that, though disappointed, forswears compromise.
But, if congenial to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to
the commonwealth. In a world where doing means marrying, and the
commonwealth is one of hearts and hands, the same peril attends the
condition.

And so we see our Eustacia--for at times she was not altogether
unlovable--arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels
that nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her
existence by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object. This was
the sole reason of his ascendency: she knew it herself. At moments
her pride rebelled against her passion for him, and she even had
longed to be free. But there was only one circumstance which could
dislodge him, and that was the advent of a greater man.

For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and took
slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather's
telescope and her grandmother's hourglass--the latter because of a
peculiar pleasure she derived from wa