n characteristics of
the town she lived in. "If I am not well-informed it shall be by no
fault of my own," she would say to herself through the tears that would
occasionally glide down her peachy cheeks when she was fairly baffled by
the portentous obscurity of many of these educational works.

Thus she lived on, a dumb, deep-feeling, great-eyed creature, construed
by not a single contiguous being; quenching with patient fortitude
her incipient interest in Farfrae, because it seemed to be one-sided,
unmaidenly, and unwise. True, that for reasons best known to herself,
she had, since Farfrae's dismissal, shifted her quarters from the back
room affording a view of the yard (which she had occupied with such
zest) to a front chamber overlooking the street; but as for the young
man, whenever he passed the house he seldom or never turned his head.

Winter had almost come, and unsettled weather made her still more
dependent upon indoor resources. But there were certain early winter
days in Casterbridge--days of firmamental exhaustion which followed
angry south-westerly tempests--when, if the sun shone, the air was like
velvet. She seized on these days for her periodical visits to the spot
where her mother lay buried--the still-used burial-ground of the old
Roman-British city, whose curious feature was this, its continuity as a
place of sepulture. Mrs. Henchard's dust mingled with the dust of women
who lay ornamented with glass hair-pins and amber necklaces, and men who
held in their mouths coins of Hadrian, Posthumus, and the Constantines.

Half-past ten in the morning was about her hour for seeking this spot--a
time when the town avenues were deserted as the avenues of Karnac.
Business had long since passed down them into its daily cells, and
Leisure had not arrived there. So Elizabeth-Jane walked and read,
or looked over the edge of the book to think, and thus reached the
churchyard.

There, approaching her mother's grave she saw a solitary dark figure in
the middle of the gravel-walk. This figure, too, was reading; but not
from a book: the words which engrossed it being the inscription on Mrs.
Henchard's tombstone. The personage was in mourning like herself, was
about her age and size, and might have been her wraith or double, but
for the fact that it was a lady much more beautifully dressed than she.
Indeed, comparatively indifferent as Elizabeth-Jane was to dress,
unless for some temporary whim or purpose, her eyes wer