Troy's Flattery and the Gold Watch — Far from the Madding Crowd

In the hayfield Troy touches his cap to the 'Queen of the Corn-market', a name he says he heard in Casterbridge, and begs her pardon a thousand times for speaking too strongly in the plantation. He has also been helping with her hay, as he did for her uncle when he was a lad. She refuses his thanks and says she would rather have his room than his company. He says he would rather have her curses than kisses from any other woman, and stays. Every answer is built to be turned against her. He says a plain man cannot lie about a beauty, that he would have cried out the same if she had been ugly and old, and that he would have made a good Christian if pretty women had not made him an idolater. She laughs in spite of herself and walks on, and he walks after her.

Then comes the question of whether people tell her she is fascinating. She says she has heard Liddy say so. Hardy calls the answer capitulation, unknown to herself, and says that the devil smiled from a loophole in Tophet. Troy follows it up with a speech on how her looks do harm: for every man she marries, ninety-nine are left to drink, to mope or to draggle after her, and the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. He quotes a French proverb about chastening those you love well, tells her he will be back to his drill in a month, and calls her rule against his speaking to her the taking of his one ewe-lamb of pleasure. She had forbidden him to speak unless she spoke first. Now she gives way. He says that he loved her at once, as the lightning works.

Then he puts a heavy gold watch into her hand. It has a coronet and the motto Cedit amor rebus inside the back, it belonged to an earl, and it is all the fortune he ever inherited. She tries again and again to give it back. As she stands there, excited, wild and honest as the day, he is startled to find how well her looks bear out the lies he has told, and he nearly means it when he asks her to keep it for his sake. She will not. He takes it back, asks leave to work in her fields, salutes, and returns to the haymakers. Bathsheba goes home hot and almost tearful, murmuring that she wishes she knew how much of it was true.