ABSTRACT
Raymond Blathwayt Mr Hardy is in himself a gentle and a singularly pleasing personality. Of middle height, with a very thoughtful face and rather melancholy eyes, he is nevertheless an interesting and amusing companion. He is regarded by the public at large as a hermit ever brooding in the far-off seclusion of a west country village. A fond delusion, which is disproved by the fact that he is almost more frequently to be seen in a London drawing-room, or a Continental hotel, than in the quiet old-world lanes of rural Dorsetshire. His wife, some few years younger than himself,1 is so particularly bright, so evidently a citizen of the wide world, that the, at first, unmistakable reminiscence that there is in her of Anglican ecclesiasticism is curiously puzzling and inexplicable to the stranger, until the information is vouchsafed that she is intimately and closely connected with what the late Lord Shaftesbury would term ‘the higher order of the clergy’.2 [...]
It was by the drawing-room fire that we sat discussing the frail but charming Tess. ‘You cannot imagine how many letters my husband received’, said Mrs Hardy,
‘begging him to end his story brightly. One dear old gentleman of over eighty wrote absolutely insisting upon her complete forgiveness and restitution’. ‘And why did you not, Mr Hardy?’ said I. ‘Surely without any very great stretching of points Tess might have left with Angel when he returned to her, and so have avoided her last great sin, with its fearful punishment?’
