Hello, I'm David Kern.

I'm Heidi Waite.

I'm Karen Zwell-O-Priar.

We're listening to Close Reeds, a podcast for the Incurable Reader,

in which we are discussing Thomas Hardy's novel, Tessa, the Duravils.

We're going to discuss phase three, phase third, which goes through chapter 24, I believe, yeah,

chapter 24 is the end of that section. Because we're a little bit short on time,

I'm not going to, no small talk this time. We're just going to dive right in, you know,

hopefully you're all doing well. Hopefully everyone out there is doing, is doing great, but we're

just going to dig right in. This is a section where Tess and Angel Claire's relationship blossoms, I guess.

She goes to be a milkmaid, what do they call it, at this farm,

and she meets Angel, and by the end of it, they are more than friends.

I think that's the one line summary of this section.

At the end of your section here, Karen, you have several questions, which I think actually,

I mean, the way I said that makes it sound like all the questions you ask aren't

worth asking. But there's a couple of questions here that I think are particularly worth us asking

because of where our conversation has gone so far in the first few episodes. So I want to turn to those.

But first, but first, I have to turn to a text message that Heidi sent me earlier. And it's,

it's about Angel because Heidi, we were texting about the book a little bit, just like kind of,

just offhand. And she said that Angel is insufferable. She said, I hate him. So I want to open up the floor for this conversation about this guy because he obviously is our like, he's a central character now.

He is, if we don't have a good grasp and what we think of him and what the book thinks of him and what we're supposed to think of him, then I feel like we can't talk about this section or the rest of the book.

And there are several

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