. .But this encompassment of her own characterisation,
based on shreds of convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic
to her, was a sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy - a cloud of
moral hobgoblins by which she was terrified without reason. It was they
that were out of harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among
the sleeping birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit
warren, or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself
as a figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the
while she was making a distinction where there was no difference. Feeling
herself in antagonism she was quite in accord. She had been made to break
an accepted social law, but no law known to the environment in which she
fancied herself such an anomaly.
