COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED: `Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface' The opening lines of A Pair of Blue Eyes instantly portray their fair possessor as vain and superficial, deficiencies which lead her to vacillation in love and `proneness to inconstancy'. Elfride's life has been a sheltered one, spent alone with her father - a parson with high social pretensions - until she meets and falls in love with an inexperienced youth, whose inferior birth prevents their marriage. This tender first love is overshadowed when Elfride is thrown into the company of the fascinating, though sexually immature, Henry Knight. United by a perilous adventure at a crucial moment, Elfride conceals her previous affection and a web of deceit follows as she tries to fulfil Knight's pure ideal. Yet her moral cowardice must inevitably lead to tragedy. . . Set in Hardy's Wessex, his haunting third novel introduces the themes of idealism, virtue and female constancy, to be developed in such later works as Tess of the D'Urbervilles,