A Pair of Blue Eyes | Page 3

Illinois
Benedictine College" within the 60 days following each date you
prepare (or were legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
periodic) tax return.
WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU
DON'T HAVE TO?
The Project gratefully accepts contributions in money, time, scanning
machines, OCR software, public domain etexts, royalty free copyright
licenses, and every other sort of contribution you can think of. Money
should be paid to "Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois Benedictine
College".
This "Small Print!" by Charles B. Kramer, Attorney Internet
([email protected]); TEL: (212-254-5093) *END*THE
SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN
ETEXTS*Ver.04.29.93*END*

A Pair of Blue Eyes
by Thomas Hardy

'A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet
not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more.'

PREFACE

The following chapters were written at a time when the craze for
indiscriminate church-restoration had just reached the remotest nooks
of western England, where the wild and tragic features of the coast had
long combined in perfect harmony with the crude Gothic Art of the
ecclesiastical buildings scattered along it, throwing into extraordinary
discord all architectural attempts at newness there. To restore the grey
carcases of a mediaevalism whose spirit had fled, seemed a not less
incongruous act than to set about renovating the adjoining crags
themselves.
Hence it happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts,
whose emotions were not without correspondence with these material
circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-
renovations a fitting frame for its presentation.
The shore and country about 'Castle Boterel' is now getting well known,
and will be readily recognized. The spot is, I may add, the furthest
westward of all those convenient corners wherein I have ventured to
erect my theatre for these imperfect little dramas of country life and
passions; and it lies near to, or no great way beyond, the vague border
of the Wessex kingdom on that side, which, like the westering verge of
modern American settlements, was progressive and uncertain.
This, however, is of little importance. The place is pre- eminently (for
one person at least) the region of dream and mystery. The ghostly birds,
the pall-like sea, the frothy wind, the eternal soliloquy of the waters,
the bloom of dark purple cast, that seems to exhale from the shoreward
precipices, in themselves lend to the scene an atmosphere like the
twilight of a night vision.
One enormous sea-bord cliff in particular figures in the narrative; and
for some forgotten reason or other this cliff was described in the story
as being without a name. Accuracy would require the statement to be
that a remarkable cliff which resembles in many points the cliff of the
description bears a name that no event has made famous.
T. H. March 1899

THE PERSONS
ELFRIDE SWANCOURT a young Lady CHRISTOPHER
SWANCOURT a Clergyman STEPHEN SMITH an Architect HENRY
KNIGHT a Reviewer and Essayist CHARLOTTE TROYTON a rich
Widow GERTRUDE JETHWAY a poor Widow SPENSER HUGO
LUXELLIAN a Peer LADY LUXELLIAN his Wife MARY AND
KATE two little Girls WILLIAM WORM a dazed Factotum JOHN
SMITH a Master-mason JANE SMITH his Wife MARTIN
CANNISTER a Sexton UNITY a Maid-servant
Other servants, masons, labourers, grooms, nondescripts, etc., etc.
THE SCENE Mostly on the outskirts of Lower Wessex.
Chapter I
'A fair vestal, throned in the west'
Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.
Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of
time, was known only to those who watched the circumstances of her
history.
Personally, she was the combination of very interesting particulars,
whose rarity, however, lay in the combination itself rather than in the
individual elements combined. As a matter of fact, you did not see the
form and substance of her features when conversing with her; and this
charming power of preventing a material study of her lineaments by an
interlocutor, originated not in the cloaking effect of a well-formed
manner (for her manner was childish and scarcely formed), but in the
attractive crudeness of the remarks themselves. She had lived all her
life in retirement--the monstrari gigito of idle men had not flattered her,
and at the age of nineteen or twenty she was no further on in social
consciousness than an urban young lady of fifteen.

One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In them
was seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to look further:
there she lived.
These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance--blue as the blue we see
between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny
September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or
surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.
As to her presence,