But since they were in town, not doing what he thought they were going to do and therefore doing something even better, he had the opportunity to take her to look at the milestone where, impelled by a force which seemed to overrule their will, Angel Clare and ’Liza-Lu had stopped, turned, waited in paralyzed suspense, and seen the black flag signifying Tess’s successful execution move slowly up the mast. Florence Henniker, as an admirer of his prose, would not have needed pressing to see such a distinguished landmark. And Hardy himself was never loth to imagine or re-imagine the hanging of a woman – particularly, perhaps, in these circumstances, one whose death made it possible for Angel Clare to get a second bite of the cherry and toddle off up the hill hand in hand with ’Liza-Lu, as he, Thomas Hardy, was not destined to toddle off anywhere with Mrs Henniker. Which is not to say that Mrs Hardy was the only obstacle, any more than it is to say that he would have taken active steps to remove her if she were. A wife is an absolutely essential possession to those pathological romancers who see a shimmering new future in every woman they meet but are congenitally parsimonious with their seed. She saves them from their own timidity. She serves as a bulkhead against which they can knock their skulls, a moral impediment in the name of which they can curse the fates, and thus she confers a tragic grandeur on a small disability. It’s difficult to imagine Hardy taking the chance of laying a single part of himself on any woman, let alone, as current speculation would have it, being careless, or giving enough, to get Tryphena Sparks with child. As for Florence Henniker, think of it like this: if he had really hoped to hear her call him hers, he would surely have chosen a different place to hear her call him hers in – he had known all his life to expect nothing good from public transport.

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