Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of her face as if they had been hieroglyphics. The denial seemed real.
“Then I ought not to hold you in this way—ought I? I have no right to you—no right to seek out where you are, or walk with you! Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?”
“How can you ask?” she said, with continued self-suppression.
“I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you repulse me?”
“I don’t repulse you. I like you to—tell me you love me; and you may always tell me so as you go about with me—and never offend me.”
“But you will not accept me as a husband?”
“Ah—that’s different—it is for your good, indeed, my dearest! O, believe me, it is only for your sake! I don’t like to give myself the great happiness o’ promising to be yours in that way—because—because I am sure I ought not to do it.”
“But you will make me happy!”
“Ah—you think so, but you don’t know!”
At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in matters social and polite, he would say that she was wonderfully well-informed and versatile—which was certainly true, her natural quickness and her admiration for him having led her to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender contests and her victory she would go away by herself under the remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or into her room, if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently, not a minute after an apparently phlegmatic negative.