“Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?”
“Yes—I did not expect it.”
“If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you time,” he said. “It was very abrupt to come home and speak to you all at once. I’ll not allude to it again for a while.”
She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath the pump, and began anew. But she could not, as at other times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream with the delicate dexterity required, try as she might; sometimes she was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in the air. She could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend and dear advocate, she could never explain.
“I can’t skim—I can’t!” she said, turning away from him.
Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate Clare began talking in a more general way:
“You quite misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an Evangelical?”
“I don’t know.”
“You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is not very High, they tell me.”
Tess’s ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom she heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague than Clare’s, who had never heard him at all.