Gabriel's Bold Proposal Goes Awry — Far from the Madding Crowd

Gabriel watches Bathsheba milk through the hedge until love becomes a daily market calculation. He learns her name and dreads the eighth day when the cow goes dry and she will stop coming. When that day arrives he vows to marry her or be good for nothing, oils his sandy hair to a shade between guano and Roman cement, and walks to her aunt's cottage with a motherless lamb in a Sunday basket.

Mrs. Hurst chatters that a dozen young men pursue Bathsheba. Gabriel blurts his purpose to the aunt before the girl appears. Bathsheba has been in the garden; she runs after him down the hill waving a white handkerchief to correct the rumour that she already has a sweetheart.

Gabriel hears liberation where she meant courtesy only, circles a holly bush, and proposes with a farmer's catalogue of piano, gig, cucumbers, and babies listed in the births column. Bathsheba admits she would like the triumph of a wedding without wanting a husband always in view. When he naively agrees he ought to marry money, she refuses him outright. He closes with dignity, promising to ask no more, and Hardy leaves him facing Ecclesiastes with a heart still hooked.