And why not? Mistaking the intentions of the other sex is never much fun, and all the evidence suggests that Hardy mistook Mrs Henniker’s, eyeball to eyeball in that compartment, on a scale. Part of the trouble, of course, was class. By which I don’t mean that Hardy couldn’t afford to travel first. Florence Henniker was the daughter of an aristocrat; and the daughters in the Hardy family were not always dead certain whose they were. That in itself didn’t stand in the way of friendship and needn’t have been a bar to romance; but a woman at home in society, accomplished in all the conversational arts, of which flirtation – especially literary flirtation – would of necessity have been one, such a woman could not have supposed, merely because she sent a fifty-three-year-old novelist photographs of herself in average décolletage and translations, done in her own hand, of only moderately doubtful French poets, that she was thereby embarking upon a desperate passion. The point is not that she was unaware of the way things worked in Dorset; what she could never have known was that the novelist fell in love with every woman he met, fell in love with her instantly and irremediably and on the spot, and all the more ardently if her spot was at some remove from his, that’s to say on the far side of a busy street or on the opposite bank of a wide swirling river, espied from the top of turning omnibuses or through the windows of fast moving trains. As long as she was walking in the opposite direction or was too far away for him to catch, he needed no further encouragement. He left home and changed his life for her, imaginatively, there and then. Which was a lot of fun for Mrs Hardy. Fifty years on he would remember in fine detail the features of a girl who had flitted past him while he was in a florist’s and he would ache for the happiness with her that he’d missed. But if it was distance that did the trick, if he sought the contrivance of some impediment or barrier, it didn’t have to be material. Glass was good. Class was better.

So Florence Henniker, sister of the Viceroy of Ireland, daughter of the literary Lord Houghton, who entertained famously and owned a notorious collection of erotica – erotica! who collected erotica in Puddletown? – Mrs Henniker could be construed as leading Hardy on just by being alive.