The gipsying at East Egdon Eustacia attends is another characteristic part of the setting of the heath. Hardy presents it as a self-contained experience set apart from ordinary life: "A whole village-full of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity. For the time Paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves." A footnote to this description is the repeated comments, by Hardy and through his characters, about the indifference to churchgoing on the part of the heath dwellers.
In her present frame of mind, annoyed with Clym and longing for Paris, Eustacia fits easily into this atmosphere with Wildeve, so easily that it frightens her. She experiences, like the others, the feelings Hardy described in the quotation given above.
As elsewhere, Hardy here foreshadows an important event to come in the story: Eustacia's suicide. Eustacia is thinking of her situation with Clym in the little cottage on the heath: "To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mockery of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire of Heaven should go much further." She is getting desperate, though she has been married only a short time. Her view of what she ought to be doing comes into sharper and sharper focus even as the chance for realizing it quickly recedes. Eustacia decides she'll be "bitterly merry, and ironically gay" and will "laugh in derision." She then goes to the gipsying.
