ring, "Whither does this new current tend
to carry me? What does it mean to my future? How does it stand
towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet--a rosy,
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be
occupied with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a
philosopher's regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting
specimen of womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the
violet or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very
early, here. Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came
the skimming, which began at a little past three. It usually fell
to the lot of some one or other of them to wake the rest, the first
being aroused by an alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival,
and they soon discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep
though the alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently
upon her. No sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed,
than she left her room and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the
ladder to Angel's, calling him in a loud whisper; then woke her
fellow-milkmaids. By the time that Tess was dressed Clare was
downstairs and out in the humid air. The remaining maids and the
dairyman usually gave themselves another turn on the pillow, and did
not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In
the twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive;
in the twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and
crescent, and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often--possibly not always by chance--the first two persons
to get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first
persons up of all the world. In these early days of her residence
here Tess did not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising,
where he was generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded,
aqueous light which pervaded the open mead impressed them with
a feeling of isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this
dim inceptive stage of the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a
dignified largeness both of disposition and physique, an almost
regnant pow