Two years later Tess left home again, to work as a milkmaid at Talbothays, a great dairy in the valley of the Var. The air was clear and the cows were many, and her spirits rose with the summer. Among the young men learning farming at the dairy was Angel Clare, a parson's son who would not become a parson because he could not believe. She knew him at once: he was the young man who had not danced with her. They met at dawn in the grey half-light of the meadows, when the mist lay in the hollows, and she seemed to him a visionary essence of woman. He called her Artemis and Demeter and other fanciful names, which she did not like. Call me Tess, she said. In a hot afternoon in July, among the cows, he took her in his arms, and she yielded.