Far From the Madding Crowd | Page 9

as a balance, enough of it being shown bare to make Oak
wish that the event had happened in the summer, when the whole
would have been revealed. There was a bright air and manner about her
now, by which she seemed to imply that the desirability of her
existence could not be questioned; and this rather saucy assumption
failed in being offensive because a beholder felt it to be, upon the
whole, true. Like exceptional emphasis in the tone of a genius, that
which would have made mediocrity ridiculous was an addition to
recognised power. It was with some surprise that she saw Gabriel's face
rising like the moon behind the hedge.
The adjustment of the farmer's hazy conceptions of her charms to the
portrait of herself she now presented him with was less a diminution
than a difference. The starting-point selected by the judgment was her
height. She seemed tall, but the pail was a small one, and the hedge
diminutive; hence, making allowance for error by comparison with
these, she could have been not above the height to be chosen by women
as best. All features of consequence were severe and regular. It may
have been observed by persons who go about the shires with eyes for
beauty, that in Englishwoman a classically-formed face is seldom
found to be united with a figure of the same pattern, the highly-finished
features being generally too large for the remainder of the frame; that a
graceful and proportionate figure of eight heads usually goes off into
random facial curves. Without throwing a Nymphean tissue over a
milkmaid, let it be said that here criticism checked itself as out of place,
and looked at her proportions with a long consciousness of pleasure.
From the contours of her figure in its upper part, she must have had a
beautiful neck and shoulders; but since her infancy nobody had ever
seen them. Had she been put into a low dress she would have run and

thrust her head into a bush. Yet she was not a shy girl by any means; it
was merely her instinct to draw the line dividing the seen from the
unseen higher than they do it in towns.
That the girl's thoughts hovered about her face and form as soon as she
caught Oak's eyes conning the same page was natural, and almost
certain. The self-consciousness shown would have been vanity if a little
more pronounced, dignity if a little less. Rays of male vision seem to
have a tickling effect upon virgin faces in rural districts; she brushed
hers with her hand, as if Gabriel had been irritating its pink surface by
actual touch, and the free air of her previous movements was reduced at
the same time to a chastened phase of itself. Yet it was the man who
blushed, the maid not at all.
"I found a hat," said Oak.
"It is mine," said she, and, from a sense of proportion, kept down to a
small smile an inclination to laugh distinctly: "it flew away last night."
"One o'clock this morning?"
"Well -- it was." She was surprised. "How did you know?" she said. "I
was here."
"You are Farmer Oak, are you not?"
"That or thereabouts. I'm lately come to this place."
"A large farm?" she inquired, casting her eyes round, and swinging
back her hair, which was black in the shaded hollows of its mass; but it
being now an hour past sunrise the rays touched its prominent curves
with a colour of their own.
"No; not large. About a hundred." (In speaking of farms the word
"acres" is omitted by the natives, by analogy to such old expressions as
"a stag of ten.")
"I wanted my hat this morning." she went on. "I had to ride to Tewnell

Mill."
"Yes you had."
"How do you know?"
"I saw you."
"Where?" she inquired, a misgiving bringing every muscle of her
lineaments and frame to a standstill.
"Here -- going through the plantation, and all down the hill," said
Farmer Oak, with an aspect excessively knowing with regard to some
matter in his mind, as he gazed at a remote point in the direction named,
and then turned back to meet his colloquist's eyes.
A perception caused him to withdraw his own eyes from hers as
suddenly as if he had been caught in a theft. Recollection of the strange
antics she had indulged in when passing through the trees was
succeeded in the girl by a nettled palpitation, and that by a hot face. It
was a time to see a woman redden who was not given to reddening as a
rule; not a point in the milkmaid but was of the deepest rose-colour.
From the Maiden's Blush, through all varieties of the Provence down