Far from the Madding Crowd

by Thomas Hardy

who could toss a pancake or twirl a mop with the accuracy of pure mathematics, and who at this moment showed hands shaggy with fragments of dough and arms encrusted with flour).

There was something in the woman's tone which is not that of the wife, and there was a manner in the man which is rarely a husband's.

Liddy, like a little brook, though shallow, was always rippling; her presence had not so much weight as to task thought, and yet enough to exercise it.

Of love as a spectacle Bathsheba had a fair knowledge; but of love subjectively she knew nothing.