prompt:
Chapter: "Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before
the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let
him profess Papist, or Protestant, or what he will, he
is no better than a Pharisee."--J. MILTON.

Shaston, the ancient British Palladour,

     From whose foundation first such strange reports
     arise,

(as Drayton sang it), was, and is, in itself the city of a dream.
Vague imaginings of its castle, its three mints, its magnificent
apsidal abbey, the chief glory of South Wessex, its twelve churches,
its shrines, chantries, hospitals, its gabled freestone mansions--all
now ruthlessly swept away--throw the visitor, even against his will,
into a pensive melancholy, which the stimulating atmosphere and
limitless landscape around him can scarcely dispel.  The spot was the
burial-place of a king and a queen, of abbots and abbesses, saints
and bishops, knights and squires.  The bones of King Edward "the
Martyr," carefully removed hither for holy preservation, brought
Shaston a renown which made it the resort of pilgrims from every part
of Europe, and enabled it to maintain a reputation extending far
beyond English shores.  To this fair creation of the great Middle-Age
the Dissolution was, as historians tell us, the death-knell. With
the destruction of the enormous abbey the whole place collapsed in a
general ruin: the Martyr's bones met with the fate of the sacred pile
that held them, and not a stone is now left to tell where they lie.

The natural picturesqueness and singularity of the town still remain;
but strange to say these qualities, which were noted by many writers
in ages when scenic beauty is said to have been unappreciated, are
passed over in this, and one of the queerest and quaintest spots in
England stands virtually unvisited to-day.

It has a unique position on the summit of a steep and imposing scarp,
rising on the north, south, and west sides of the borough out of
the deep alluvial Vale of Blackmoor, the view from the Castle Green
over three counties of verdant pasture--South, Mid, and Nether
Wessex--being as sudden a surprise to the unexpectant traveller's
eyes as the medicinal air is to his lungs.  Impossible to a railway,
it can best be reached on foot, next best by light vehicles; and
it is hardly accessible to these but by a sort of isthmus on the
north-east, that connects it with the high chalk table-land on that
side.

Such is, and such was, the now world-forgotten Shaston or Palladour.
Its situation rendered water the great want of the town; and within
living memory, horses, donkeys and men may have been seen toiling
up the winding ways to the top of the height, laden with tubs and
barrels filled from the wells beneath the mountain, and hawkers
retailing their contents at the price of a halfpenny a bucketful.

This difficulty in the water supply, together with two other odd
facts, namely, that the chief graveyard slopes up as steeply as a
roof behind the church, and that in former times the town passed
through a curious period of corruption, conventual and domestic, gave
rise to the saying that Shaston was remarkable for three consolations
to man, such as the world afforded not elsewhere.  It was a place
where the churchyard lay nearer heaven than the church steeple, where
beer was more plentiful than water, and where there were more wanton
women than honest wives and maids.  It is also said that after the
Middle Ages the inhabitants were too poor to pay their priests,
and hence were compelled to pull down their churches, and refrain
altogether from the public worship of God; a necessity which they
bemoaned over their cups in the settles of their inns on Sunday
afternoons.  In those days the Shastonians were apparently not
without a sense of humour.

There was another peculiarity--this a modern one--which Shaston
appeared to owe to its site.  It was the resting-place and
headquarters of the proprietors of wandering vans, shows,
shooting-galleries, and other itinerant concerns, whose business
lay largely at fairs and markets.  As strange wild birds are seen
assembled on some lofty promontory, meditatively pausing for longer
flights, or to return by the course they followed thither, so here,
in this cliff-town, stood in stultified silence the yellow and green
caravans bearing names not local, as if surprised by a change in the
landscape so violent as to hinder their further progress; and here
they usually remained all the winter till they turned to seek again
their old tracks in the following spring.

It was to this breezy and whimsical spot that Jude ascended from the
nearest station for the first time in his life about four o'clock one
afternoon, and entering on the summit of the peak after a toilsome
climb, passed the first houses of the aerial town; and drew towards
the school-house.  The hour was too early; the pupils were still in
school, humming small, like a swarm of gnats; and he withdrew a few
steps along Abbey Walk, whence he regarded the spot which fate had
made the home of all he loved best in the world.  In front of the
schools, which were extensive and stone-built, grew two enormous
beeches with smooth mouse-coloured trunks, as such trees will only
grow on chalk uplands.  Within the mullioned and transomed windows he
could see the black, brown, and flaxen crowns of the scholars over
the sills, and to pass the time away he walked down to the level
terrace where the abbey gardens once had spread, his heart throbbing
in spite of him.

Unwilling to enter till the children were dismissed he remained here
till young voices could be heard in the open air, and girls in white
pinafores over red and blue frocks appeared dancing along the paths
which the abbess, prioress, subprioress, and fifty nuns had demurely
paced three centuries earlier.  Retracing his steps he found that he
had waited too long, and that Sue had gone out into the town at the
heels of the last scholar, Mr. Phillotson having been absent all the
afternoon at a teachers' meeting at Shottsford.

Jude went into the empty schoolroom and sat down, the girl who was
sweeping the floor having informed him that Mrs. Phillotson would be
back again in a few minutes.  A piano stood near--actually the old
piano that Phillotson had possessed at Marygreen--and though the dark
afternoon almost prevented him seeing the notes Jude touched them in
his humble way, and could not help modulating into the hymn which had
so affected him in the previous week.

A figure moved behind him, and thinking it was still the girl with
the broom Jude took no notice, till the person came close and laid
her fingers lightly upon his bass hand.  The imposed hand was a
little one he seemed to know, and he turned.

"Don't stop," said Sue.  "I like it.  I learnt it before I left
Melchester.  They used to play it in the training school."

"I can't strum before you!  Play it for me."

"Oh well--I don't mind."

Sue sat down, and her rendering of the piece, though not remarkable,
seemed divine as compared with his own.  She, like him, was evidently
touched--to her own surprise--by the recalled air; and when she
had finished, and he moved his hand towards hers, it met his own
half-way. Jude grasped it--just as he had done before her marriage.

"It is odd," she said, in a voice quite changed, "that I should care
about that air; because--"

"Because what?"

"I am not that sort--quite."

"Not easily moved?"

"I didn't quite mean that."

"Oh, but you ARE one of that sort, for you are just like me at
heart!"

"But not at head."

She played on and suddenly turned round; and by an unpremeditated
instinct each clasped the other's hand again.

She uttered a forced little laugh as she relinquished his quickly.
"How funny!" she said.  "I wonder what we both did that for?"

"I suppose because we are both alike, as I said before."

"Not in our thoughts!  Perhaps a little in our feelings."

"And they rule thoughts...  Isn't it enough to make one blaspheme
that the composer of that hymn is one of the most commonplace men I
ever met!"

"What--you know him?"

"I went to see him."

"Oh, you goose--to do just what I should have done!  Why did you?"

"Because we are not alike," he said drily.

"Now we'll have some tea," said Sue.  "Shall we have it here instead
of in my house?  It is no trouble to get the kettle and things
brought in.  We don't live at the school you know, but in that
ancient dwelling across the way called Old-Grove Place.  It is so
antique and dismal that it depresses me dreadfully.  Such houses are
very well to visit, but not to live in--I feel crushed into the earth
by the weight of so many previous lives there spent.  In a new place
like these schools there is only your own life to support.  Sit down,
and I'll tell Ada to bring the tea-things across."

He waited in the light of the stove, the door of which she flung open
before going out, and when she returned, followed by the maiden with
tea, they sat down by the same light, assisted by the blue rays of a
spirit-lamp under the brass kettle on the stand.

"This is one of your wedding-presents to me," she said, signifying
the latter.

"Yes," said Jude.

The kettle of his gift sang with some satire in its note, to his
mind; and to change the subject he said, "Do you know of any good
readable edition of the uncanonical books of the New Testament?  You
don't read them in the school I suppose?"

"Oh dear no!--'twould alarm the neighbourhood...  Yes, there is one.
I am not familiar with it now, though I was interested in it when my
former friend was alive.  Cowper's _Apocryphal Gospels_."

"That sounds like what I want."  His thoughts, however reverted with
a twinge to the "former friend"--by whom she meant, as he knew, the
university comrade of her earlier days.  He wondered if she talked of
him to Phillotson.

"The Gospel of Nicodemus is very nice," she went on to keep him from
his jealous thoughts, which she read clearly, as she always did.
Indeed when they talked on an indifferent subject, as now, there was
ever a second silent conversation passing between their emotions,
so perfect was the reciprocity between them.  "It is quite like the
genuine article.  All cut up into verses, too; so that it is like
one of the other evangelists read in a dream, when things are the
same, yet not the same.  But, Jude, do you take an interest in those
questions still?  Are you getting up _Apologetica_?"

"Yes.  I am reading Divinity harder than ever."

She regarded him curiously.

"Why do you look at me like that?" said Jude.

"Oh--why do you want to know?"

"I am sure you can tell me anything I may be ignorant of in that
subject.  You must have learnt a lot of everything from your dear
dead friend!"

"We won't get on to that now!" she coaxed.  "Will you be carving out
at that church again next week, where you learnt the pretty hymn?"

"Yes, perhaps."

"That will be very nice.  Shall I come and see you there?  It is in
this direction, and I could come any afternoon by train for half an
hour?"

"No. Don't come!"

"What--aren't we going to be friends, then, any longer, as we used to
be?"

"No."

"I didn't know that.  I thought you were always going to be kind to
me!"

"No, I am not."

"What have I done, then?  I am sure I thought we two--"  The
_tremolo_ in her voice caused her to break off.

"Sue, I sometimes think you are a flirt," said he abruptly.

There was a momentary pause, till she suddenly jumped up; and to his
surprise he saw by the kettle-flame that her face was flushed.

"I can't talk to you any longer, Jude!" she said, the tragic
contralto note having come back as of old.  "It is getting too dark
to stay together like this, after playing morbid Good Friday tunes
that make one feel what one shouldn't! ...  We mustn't sit and talk
in this way any more.  Yes--you must go away, for you mistake me!  I
am very much the reverse of what you say so cruelly--Oh, Jude, it WAS
cruel to say that!  Yet I can't tell you the truth--I should shock
you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I
feel that I shouldn't have been provided with attractiveness unless
it were meant to be exercised!  Some women's love of being loved is
insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last
case they may find that they can't give it continuously to the
chamber-officer appointed by the bishop's licence to receive it.
But you are so straightforward, Jude, that you can't understand
me! ...  Now you must go. I am sorry my husband is not at home."

"Are you?"

"I perceive I have said that in mere convention!  Honestly I don't
think I am sorry.  It does not matter, either way, sad to say!"

As they had overdone the grasp of hands some time sooner, she touched
his fingers but lightly when he went out now.  He had hardly gone
from the door when, with a dissatisfied look, she jumped on a form
and opened the iron casement of a window beneath which he was passing
in the path without.  "When do you leave here to catch your train,
Jude?" she asked.

He looked up in some surprise.  "The coach that runs to meet it goes
in three-quarters of an hour or so."

"What will you do with yourself for the time?"

"Oh--wander about, I suppose.  Perhaps I shall go and sit in the old
church."

"It does seem hard of me to pack you off so!  You have thought enough
of churches, Heaven knows, without going into one in the dark. Stay
there."

"Where?"

"Where you are.  I can talk to you better like this than when you
were inside...  It was so kind and tender of you to give up half
a day's work to come to see me! ...  You are Joseph the dreamer of
dreams, dear Jude.  And a tragic Don Quixote.  And sometimes you
are St. Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven
opened.  Oh, my poor friend and comrade, you'll suffer yet!"

Now that the high window-sill was between them, so that he could not
get at her, she seemed not to mind indulging in a frankness she had
feared at close quarters.

"I have been thinking," she continued, still in the tone of one
brimful of feeling, "that the social moulds civilization fits us into
have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional
shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns.  I
am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with
my counterpart of that name.  But I am not really Mrs. Richard
Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant
passions, and unaccountable antipathies...  Now you mustn't wait
longer, or you will lose the coach.  Come and see me again.  You
must come to the house then."

"Yes!" said Jude.  "When shall it be?"

"To-morrow week.  Good-bye--good-bye!"  She stretched out her hand
and stroked his forehead pitifully--just once.  Jude said good-bye,
and went away into the darkness.

Passing along Bimport Street he thought he heard the wheels of the
coach departing, and, truly enough, when he reached the Duke's Arms
in the Market Place the coach had gone.  It was impossible for him
to get to the station on foot in time for this train, and he settled
himself perforce to wait for the next--the last to Melchester that
night.

He wandered about awhile, obtained something to eat; and then, having
another half-hour on his hands, his feet involuntarily took him
through the venerable graveyard of Trinity Church, with its avenues
of limes, in the direction of the schools again.  They were entirely
in darkness.  She had said she lived over the way at Old-Grove
Place, a house which he soon discovered from her description of its
antiquity.

A glimmering candlelight shone from a front window, the shutters
being yet unclosed.  He could see the interior clearly--the floor
sinking a couple of steps below the road without, which had become
raised during the centuries since the house was built.  Sue,
evidently just come in, was standing with her hat on in this front
parlour or sitting-room, whose walls were lined with wainscoting
of panelled oak reaching from floor to ceiling, the latter being
crossed by huge moulded beams only a little way above her head.  The
mantelpiece was of the same heavy description, carved with Jacobean
pilasters and scroll-work.  The centuries did, indeed, ponderously
overhang a young wife who passed her time here.

She had opened a rosewood work-box, and was looking at a photograph.
Having contemplated it a little while she pressed it against her
bosom, and put it again in its place.

Then becoming aware that she had not obscured the windows she came
forward to do so, candle in hand.  It was too dark for her to see
Jude without, but he could see her face distinctly, and there was an
unmistakable tearfulness about the dark, long-lashed eyes.

She closed the shutters, and Jude turned away to pursue his solitary
journey home.  "Whose photograph was she looking at?" he said.  He
had once given her his; but she had others, he knew.  Yet it was his,
surely?

He knew he should go to see her again, according to her invitation.
Those earnest men he read of, the saints, whom Sue, with gentle
irreverence, called his demi-gods, would have shunned such encounters
if they doubted their own strength.  But he could not.  He might fast
and pray during the whole interval, but the human was more powerful
in him than the Divine.

However, if God disposed not, woman did.  The next morning but one
brought him this note from her:

   Don't come next week.  On your own account don't!  We were
   too free, under the influence of that morbid hymn and the
   twilight.  Think no more than you can help of

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY.

The disappointment was keen.  He knew her mood, the look of her face,
when she subscribed herself at length thus.  But, whatever her mood, he
could not say she was wrong in her view. He replied:

   I acquiesce.  You are right.  It is a lesson in
   renunciation which I suppose I ought to learn at this
   season.

   JUDE.

He despatched the note on Easter Eve, and there seemed a finality
in their decisions.  But other forces and laws than theirs were in
operation.  On Easter Monday morning he received a message from the
Widow Edlin, whom he had directed to telegraph if anything serious
happened:

   Your aunt is sinking.  Come at once.

He threw down his tools and went.  Three and a half hours later he
was crossing the downs about Marygreen, and presently plunged into
the concave field across which the short cut was made to the village.
As he ascended on the other side a labouring man, who had been
watching his approach from a gate across the path, moved uneasily,
and prepared to speak.  "I can see in his face that she is dead,"
said Jude.  "Poor Aunt Drusilla!"

It was as he had supposed, and Mrs. Edlin had sent out the man to
break the news to him.

"She wouldn't have knowed 'ee.  She lay like a doll wi' glass eyes;
so it didn't matter that you wasn't here," said he.

Jude went on to the house, and in the afternoon, when everything was
done, and the layers-out had finished their beer, and gone, he sat
down alone in the silent place.  It was absolutely necessary to
communicate with Sue, though two or three days earlier they had
agreed to mutual severance.  He wrote in the briefest terms:

   Aunt Drusilla is dead, having been taken almost suddenly.
   The funeral is on Friday afternoon.

He remained in and about Marygreen through the intervening days,
went out on Friday morning to see that the grave was finished, and
wondered if Sue would come.  She had not written, and that seemed to
signify rather that she would come than that she would not.  Having
timed her by her only possible train, he locked the door about
mid-day, and crossed the hollow field to the verge of the upland by
the Brown House, where he stood and looked over the vast prospect
northwards, and over the nearer landscape in which Alfredston stood.
Two miles behind it a jet of white steam was travelling from the left
to the right of the picture.

There was a long time to wait, even now, till he would know if she
had arrived.  He did wait, however, and at last a small hired vehicle
pulled up at the bottom of the hill, and a person alighted, the
conveyance going back, while the passenger began ascending the
hill.  He knew her; and she looked so slender to-day that it seemed
as if she might be crushed in the intensity of a too passionate
embrace--such as it was not for him to give.  Two-thirds of the way
up her head suddenly took a solicitous poise, and he knew that she
had at that moment recognized him.  Her face soon began a pensive
smile, which lasted till, having descended a little way, he met her.

"I thought," she began with nervous quickness, "that it would be
so sad to let you attend the funeral alone!  And so--at the last
moment--I came."

"Dear faithful Sue!" murmured Jude.

With the elusiveness of her curious double nature, however, Sue did
not stand still for any further greeting, though it wanted some
time to the burial.  A pathos so unusually compounded as that which
attached to this hour was unlikely to repeat itself for years, if
ever, and Jude would have paused, and meditated, and conversed.  But
Sue either saw it not at all, or, seeing it more than he, would not
allow herself to feel it.

The sad and simple ceremony was soon over, their progress to the
church being almost at a trot, the bustling undertaker having a more
important funeral an hour later, three miles off.  Drusilla was put
into the new ground, quite away from her ancestors.  Sue and Jude
had gone side by side to the grave, and now sat down to tea in the
familiar house; their lives united at least in this last attention
to the dead.

"She was opposed to marriage, from first to last, you say?" murmured
Sue.

"Yes.  Particularly for members of our family."

Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.

"We are rather a sad family, don't you think, Jude?"

"She said we made bad husbands and wives.  Certainly we make unhappy
ones.  At all events, I do, for one!"

Sue was silent.  "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative
tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are
unhappy in their marriage?  If a marriage ceremony is a religious
thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract,
based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing,
and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it
necessary that the male parent should be known--which it seems to
be--why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops,
that it hurts and grieves him or her?"

"I have said so, anyhow, to you."

Presently she went on: "Are there many couples, do you think, where
one dislikes the other for no definite fault?"

"Yes, I suppose.  If either cares for another person, for instance."

"But even apart from that?  Wouldn't the woman, for example, be very
bad-natured if she didn't like to live with her husband; merely"--her
voice undulated, and he guessed things--"merely because she had a
personal feeling against it--a physical objection--a fastidiousness,
or whatever it may be called--although she might respect and be
grateful to him?  I am merely putting a case.  Ought she to try to
overcome her pruderies?"

Jude threw a troubled look at her.  He said, looking away: "It would
be just one of those cases in which my experiences go contrary to my
dogmas.  Speaking as an order-loving man--which I hope I am, though
I fear I am not--I should say, yes.  Speaking from experience and
unbiased nature, I should say, no....  Sue, I believe you are not
happy!"

"Of course I am!" she contradicted.  "How can a woman be unhappy who
has only been married eight weeks to a man she chose freely?"

"'Chose freely!'"

"Why do you repeat it? ...  But I have to go back by the six o'clock
train.  You will be staying on here, I suppose?"

"For a few days to wind up Aunt's affairs.  This house is gone now.
Shall I go to the train with you?"

A little laugh of objection came from Sue.  "I think not.  You may
come part of the way."

"But stop--you can't go to-night!  That train won't take you to
Shaston.  You must stay and go back to-morrow.  Mrs. Edlin has plenty
of room, if you don't like to stay here?"

"Very well," she said dubiously.  "I didn't tell him I would come for
certain."

Jude went to the widow's house adjoining, to let her know; and
returning in a few minutes sat down again.

"It is horrible how we are circumstanced, Sue--horrible!" he said
abruptly, with his eyes bent to the floor.

"No!  Why?"

"I can't tell you all my part of the gloom.  Your part is that you
ought not to have married him.  I saw it before you had done it, but
I thought I mustn't interfere.  I was wrong.  I ought to have!"

"But what makes you assume all this, dear?"

"Because--I can see you through your feathers, my poor little bird!"

Her hand lay on the table, and Jude put his upon it.  Sue drew hers
away.

"That's absurd, Sue," cried he, "after what we've been talking about!
I am more strict and formal than you, if it comes to that; and that
you should object to such an innocent action shows that you are
ridiculously inconsistent!"

"Perhaps it was too prudish," she said repentantly.  "Only I have
fancied it was a sort of trick of ours--too frequent perhaps.  There,
you may hold it as much as you like. Is that good of me?"

"Yes; very."

"But I must tell him."

"Who?"

"Richard."

"Oh--of course, if you think it necessary.  But as it means nothing
it may be bothering him needlessly."

"Well--are you sure you mean it only as my cousin?"

"Absolutely sure.  I have no feelings of love left in me."

"That's news.  How has it come to be?"

"I've seen Arabella."

She winced at the hit; then said curiously, "When did you see her?"

"When I was at Christminster."

"So she's come back; and you never told me!  I suppose you will live
with her now?"

"Of course--just as you live with your husband."

She looked at the window pots with the geraniums and cactuses,
withered for want of attention, and through them at the outer
distance, till her eyes began to grow moist.  "What is it?" said
Jude, in a softened tone.

"Why should you be so glad to go back to her if--if what you used to
say to me is still true--I mean if it were true then!  Of course it
is not now!  How could your heart go back to Arabella so soon?"

"A special Providence, I suppose, helped it on its way."

"Ah--it isn't true!" she said with gentle resentment.  "You are
teasing me--that's all--because you think I am not happy!"

"I don't know.  I don't wish to know."

"If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that
I should have a right to dislike him!  He is considerate to me in
everything; and he is very interesting, from the amount of general
knowledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his
way....  Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his
own age, or one younger than himself--eighteen years--as I am than
he?"

"It depends upon what they feel for each other."

He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on
unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears:

"I--I think I must be equally honest with you as you have been with
me.  Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say?--that though I
like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don't like him--it is a torture to
me to--live with him as a husband!--There, now I have let it out--I
couldn't help it, although I have been--pretending I am happy.--Now
you'll have a contempt for me for ever, I suppose!"  She bent down
her face upon her hands as they lay upon the cloth, and silently
sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged table
quiver.

"I have only been married a month or two!" she went on, still
remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands.  "And it
is said that what a woman shrinks from--in the early days of her
marriage--she shakes down to with comfortable indifference in half a
dozen years.  But that is much like saying that the amputation of a
limb is no affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to
the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time!"

Jude could hardly speak, but he said, "I thought there was something
wrong, Sue!  Oh, I thought there was!"

"But it is not as you think!--there is nothing wrong except my own
wickedness, I suppose you'd call it--a repugnance on my part, for a
reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by
the world in general! ...  What tortures me so much is the necessity
of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is
morally!--the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a
matter whose essence is its voluntariness! ...  I wish he would beat
me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk
about as a justification for feeling as I do!  But he does nothing,
except that he has grown a little cold since he has found out how I
feel.  That's why he didn't come to the funeral...  Oh, I am very
miserable--I don't know what to do! ...  Don't come near me, Jude,
because you mustn't.  Don't--don't!"

But he had jumped up and put his face against hers--or rather against
her ear, her face being inaccessible.

"I told you not to, Jude!"

"I know you did--I only wish to--console you!  It all arose through
my being married before we met, didn't it?  You would have been my
wife, Sue, wouldn't you, if it hadn't been for that?"

Instead of replying she rose quickly, and saying she was going to
walk to her aunt's grave in the churchyard to recover herself, went
out of the house.  Jude did not follow her.  Twenty minutes later he
saw her cross the village green towards Mrs. Edlin's, and soon she
sent a little girl to fetch her bag, and tell him she was too tired
to see him again that night.

In the lonely room of his aunt's house, Jude sat watching the
cottage of the Widow Edlin as it disappeared behind the night shade.
He knew that Sue was sitting within its walls equally lonely and
disheartened; and again questioned his devotional motto that all was
for the best.

He retired to rest early, but his sleep was fitful from the sense
that Sue was so near at hand.  At some time near two o'clock, when
he was beginning to sleep more soundly, he was aroused by a shrill
squeak that had been familiar enough to him when he lived regularly
at Marygreen.  It was the cry of a rabbit caught in a gin.  As was
the little creature's habit, it did not soon repeat its cry; and
probably would not do so more than once or twice; but would remain
bearing its torture till the morrow when the trapper would come and
knock it on the head.

He who in his childhood had saved the lives of the earthworms now
began to picture the agonies of the rabbit from its lacerated leg.
If it were a "bad catch" by the hind-leg, the animal would tug
during the ensuing six hours till the iron teeth of the trap had
stripped the leg-bone of its flesh, when, should a weak-springed
instrument enable it to escape, it would die in the fields from the
mortification of the limb.  If it were a "good catch," namely, by the
fore-leg, the bone would be broken and the limb nearly torn in two in
attempts at an impossible escape.

Almost half an hour passed, and the rabbit repeated its cry.  Jude
could rest no longer till he had put it out of its pain, so dressing
himself quickly he descended, and by the light of the moon went
across the green in the direction of the sound.  He reached the hedge
bordering the widow's garden, when he stood still.  The faint click
of the trap as dragged about by the writhing animal guided him now,
and reaching the spot he struck the rabbit on the back of the neck
with the side of his palm, and it stretched itself out dead.

He was turning away when he saw a woman looking out of the open
casement at a window on the ground floor of the adjacent cottage.
"Jude!" said a voice timidly--Sue's voice.  "It is you--is it not?"

"Yes, dear!"

"I haven't been able to sleep at all, and then I heard the rabbit,
and couldn't help thinking of what it suffered, till I felt I must
come down and kill it!  But I am so glad you got there first...  They
ought not to be allowed to set these steel traps, ought they!"

Jude had reached the window, which was quite a low one, so that she
was visible down to her waist.  She let go the casement-stay and put
her hand upon his, her moonlit face regarding him wistfully.

"Did it keep you awake?" he said.

"No--I was awake."

"How was that?"

"Oh, you know--now!  I know you, with your religious doctrines, think
that a married woman in trouble of a kind like mine commits a mortal
sin in making a man the confidant of it, as I did you.  I wish I
hadn't, now!"

"Don't wish it, dear," he said.  "That may have BEEN my view; but my
doctrines and I begin to part company."

"I knew it--I knew it!  And that's why I vowed I wouldn't disturb
your belief.  But--I am SO GLAD to see you!--and, oh, I didn't mean
to see you again, now the last tie between us, Aunt Drusilla, is
dead!"

Jude seized her hand and kissed it.  "There is a stronger one left!"
he said.  "I'll never care about my doctrines or my religion any
more!  Let them go!  Let me help you, even if I do love you, and even
if you..."

"Don't say it!--I know what you mean; but I can't admit so much as
that.  There!  Guess what you like, but don't press me to answer
questions!"

"I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!"

"I CAN'T be!  So few could enter into my feeling--they would say
'twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and
condemn me...  It is none of the natural tragedies of love that's
love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially
manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in
parting! ...  It would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my
distress to you, if I had been able to tell it to anybody else.  But
I have nobody.  And I MUST tell somebody!  Jude, before I married
him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I
knew.  It was idiotic of me--there is no excuse.  I was old enough,
and I thought I was very experienced.  So I rushed on, when I had got
into that training school scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the
fool that I was! ...  I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo
what one had done so ignorantly!  I daresay it happens to lots of
women, only they submit, and I kick...  When people of a later age
look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times
that we have the unhappiness to live in, what WILL they say!"

"You are very bitter, darling Sue!  How I wish--I wish--"

"You must go in now!"

In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon
his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little
kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could
not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have
done.  She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: When Jude visits Sue at Shaston, he sits playing his favorite hymn while waiting for her to come in. Her being moved by it causes him to say that at heart they are alike, but Sue counters by saying they are, however, not alike "at head." When they argue over whether they can still be friends, Jude calls her a flirt; she replies by saying that some women can't be satisfied with loving and being loved by only one man. She calls him a Joseph, a Don Quixote, a St. Stephen, and speaks of herself as a woman full of conflicting feelings. Leaving her and wandering about the town while waiting for his train, Jude finally finds his way back to Sue's house, and from the dark sees her inside take out a photograph and clasp it to her bosom but can't be sure if it's his. He knows that he will go see her again, no matter what resolves he makes. Though Sue writes to say he mustn't come to see her and Jude replies to agree, he does notify her when his aunt dies, expecting Sue to come to Marygreen for the funeral. She does come, and after the funeral she brings up the subject of unhappy marriages and the reasons for them, particularly mentioning a woman's "fastidiousness." When Jude tries to apply her remarks personally, she insists she is not unhappy. Purposely, Jude tells her that he has seen Arabella and he may go back to her because of the way Sue has acted toward him. Sue finally does admit she is unhappy but blames it on her own wickedness, though she says that "what tortures so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally." Later, when Jude goes outside to put out of its suffering a rabbit caught in a trap, he finds that Sue has been unable to sleep. She says that with his religious beliefs he must think it a sin for her to tell him her troubles, but Jude replies that he will forego all his beliefs if she will let him help her.


prompt:
Chapter: Sue's distressful confession recurred to Jude's mind all the night as
being a sorrow indeed.

The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours saw
her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill path
which led into the lonely road to Alfredston.  An hour passed before
he returned along the same route, and in his face there was a look of
exaltation not unmixed with recklessness.  An incident had occurred.

They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and
passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how
far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and
she said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in
embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell as he
now wished to do.  Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss
would be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it.  If given
in the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in
the spirit of a lover she could not permit it.  "Will you swear that
it will not be in that spirit?" she had said.

No: he would not.  And then they had turned from each other in
estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a distance
of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously.
That look behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less
maintained.  They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most
unpremeditatedly, kissed close and long.  When they parted for good
it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.

The kiss was a turning-point in Jude's career.  Back again in the
cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though
his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his
faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it
was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the
soldier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded
as at its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation.  What Sue
had said in warmth was really the cold truth.  When to defend
his affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in
impassioned attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was
condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the accepted school of
morals.  He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by
social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited
dogma.

Strange that his first aspiration--towards academical
proficiency--had been checked by a woman, and that his second
aspiration--towards apostleship--had also been checked by a woman.
"Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the
artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are
turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back
those who want to progress?"

It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble,
to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal
gain.  Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and
himself in love erratically, the loved one's revolt against her state
being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable
according to regulation views.

It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the
obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a
law-abiding religious teacher.

At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole,
to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that
he possessed, and had stored here.  He knew that, in this country of
true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price
than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own
way, even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of
thus destroying them.  Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with,
he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a
three-pronged fork shook them over the flames.  They kindled, and
lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till
they were more or less consumed.

Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to
him over the garden hedge.

"Burning up your awld aunt's rubbidge, I suppose?  Ay; a lot gets
heaped up in nooks and corners when you've lived eighty years in one
house."

It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before the leaves, covers,
and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman
and the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he
turned and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being
no longer a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which
gave him calm.  He might go on believing as before, but he professed
nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which,
as their proprietor, he might naturally be supposed to exercise on
himself first of all.  In his passion for Sue he could not stand as
an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited sepulchre.

Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone
along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and
let him kiss her.  Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a
lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally,
if not wrongly.  She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue's
logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that
before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done
it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in
theory were wrong in practice.

"I have been too weak, I think!" she jerked out as she pranced on,
shaking down tear-drops now and then.  "It was burning, like a
lover's--oh, it was!  And I won't write to him any more, or at least
for a long time, to impress him with my dignity!  And I hope it will
hurt him very much--expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the
next, and the next, and no letter coming.  He'll suffer then with
suspense--won't he, that's all!--and I am very glad of it!"--Tears
of pity for Jude's approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with
those which had surged up in pity for herself.

Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable
to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by
temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial
relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked
fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by
gazing and worrying hopelessly.

Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was
troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing effect of her
aunt's death and funeral.  He began telling her of his day's doings,
and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he
had not seen for years, had called upon him.  While ascending to the
town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly
and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and
its bordering bushes of hazel:

"Richard--I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while.  I don't know
whether you think it wrong?"

He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said
vaguely, "Oh, did you?  What did you do that for?"

"I don't know.  He wanted to, and I let him."

"I hope it pleased him.  I should think it was hardly a novelty."

They lapsed into silence.  Had this been a case in the court of an
omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact
that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not
said a word about the kiss.

After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.
She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition,
and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early.  When
Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the
attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock.  Entering
their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty
miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went
to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with
hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered
the far-reaching scene.  He was musing, "I think," he said at last,
without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change
the school-stationer.  All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."

There was no reply.  Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:

"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room.  The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives
me the ear-ache."

As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.
The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls
upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the
massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast
to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch
furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod
to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.

"Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).

She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there--the
clothes on her side being flung back.  Thinking she might have
forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to
see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a
few minutes, when, finding she did not come, he went out upon the
landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"

"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen
quarter.

"What are you doing down there at midnight--tiring yourself out for
nothing!"

"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."

He went to bed.  Some time in the night he awoke.  She was not there,
even now.  Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing,
and again called her name.

She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones were small and confined,
and whence they came he could not at first understand.  Under the
staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed
to come from it.  The door was shut, but there was no lock or other
fastening.  Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she
had suddenly become deranged.

"What are you doing in there?" he asked.

"Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late."

"But there's no bed, is there?  And no ventilation!  Why, you'll be
suffocated if you stay all night!"

"Oh no, I think not.  Don't trouble about me."

"But--"  Phillotson seized the knob and pulled at the door.  She had
fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke at his pull.
There being no bedstead she had flung down some rugs and made a
little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet
afforded.

When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and
trembling.

"You ought not to have pulled open the door!" she cried excitedly.
"It is not becoming in you!  Oh, will you go away; please will you!"

She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white nightgown against the
shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried.  She continued to
beseech him not to disturb her.

He said: "I've been kind to you, and given you every liberty; and it
is monstrous that you should feel in this way!"

"Yes," said she, weeping.  "I know that!  It is wrong and wicked of
me, I suppose!  I am very sorry.  But it is not I altogether that am
to blame!"

"Who is then?  Am I?"

"No--I don't know!  The universe, I suppose--things in general,
because they are so horrid and cruel!"

"Well, it is no use talking like that.  Making a man's house so
unseemly at this time o' night!  Eliza will hear if we don't mind."
(He meant the servant.)  "Just think if either of the parsons in this
town was to see us now!  I hate such eccentricities, Sue.  There's no
order or regularity in your sentiments! ...  But I won't intrude on
you further; only I would advise you not to shut the door too tight,
or I shall find you stifled to-morrow."

On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet, but
Sue had already gone downstairs.  There was a little nest where she
had lain, and spiders' webs hung overhead.  "What must a woman's
aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!" he said
bitterly.

He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal began
almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement--or
rather roadway, pavements being scarce here--which was two or three
feet above the level of the parlour floor.  They nodded down to the
happy couple their morning greetings, as they went on.

"Richard," she said all at once; "would you mind my living away from
you?"

"Away from me?  Why, that's what you were doing when I married you.
What then was the meaning of marrying at all?"

"You wouldn't like me any the better for telling you."

"I don't object to know."

"Because I thought I could do nothing else.  You had got my promise a
long time before that, remember.  Then, as time went on, I regretted
I had promised you, and was trying to see an honourable way to break
it off.  But as I couldn't I became rather reckless and careless
about the conventions.  Then you know what scandals were spread, and
how I was turned out of the training school you had taken such time
and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and this frightened
me and it seemed then that the one thing I could do would be to let
the engagement stand.  Of course I, of all people, ought not to have
cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care
for.  But I was a coward--as so many women are--and my theoretic
unconventionality broke down.  If that had not entered into the case
it would have been better to have hurt your feelings once for all
then, than to marry you and hurt them all my life after...  And you
were so generous in never giving credit for a moment to the rumour."

"I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its probability and
inquired of your cousin about it."

"Ah!" she said with pained surprise.

"I didn't doubt you."

"But you inquired!"

"I took his word."

Her eyes had filled.  "HE wouldn't have inquired!" she said.
"But you haven't answered me.  Will you let me go away?  I know how
irregular it is of me to ask it--"

"It is irregular."

"But I do ask it!  Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classified.  If people are at all
peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that
produce comfort in others! ...  Will you let me?"

"But we married--"

"What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances," she burst out,
"if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?"

"But you are committing a sin in not liking me."

"I DO like you!  But I didn't reflect it would be--that it would be
so much more than that...  For a man and woman to live on intimate
terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances,
however legal.  There--I've said it! ...  Will you let me, Richard?"

"You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"

"Why can't we agree to free each other?  We made the compact, and
surely we can cancel it--not legally of course; but we can morally,
especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen
to be looked after.  Then we might be friends, and meet without pain
to either.  Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity!  We shall both be
dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you
relieved me from constraint for a little while?  I daresay you think
me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd.  Well--why
should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn't hurt other
people?"

"But it does--it hurts ME!  And you vowed to love me."

"Yes--that's it!  I am in the wrong.  I always am!  It is as culpable
to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as
silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"

"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"

"Well, if you insisted, yes.  But I meant living with Jude."

"As his wife?"

"As I choose."

Phillotson writhed.

Sue continued: "She, or he, 'who lets the world, or his own portion
of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the apelike one of imitation.'  J. S. Mill's words,
those are.  I have been reading it up.  Why can't you act upon them?
I wish to, always."

"What do I care about J. S. Mill!" moaned he.  "I only want to lead
a quiet life!  Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never
once occurred to me before our marriage--that you were in love, and
are in love, with Jude Fawley!"

"You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun.  But do you
suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and
live with him?"

The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of
replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being
such a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_ as she, in her loss of
courage at the last moment, meant it to appear.  She was beginning to
be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her
other little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could
make.

They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering
the class-room, where he could see the back of her head through the
glass partition whenever he turned his eyes that way.  As he went on
giving and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched from
concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore a scrap
from a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:

   Your request prevents my attending to work at all.  I don't
   know what I am doing!  Was it seriously made?

He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little
boy to take to Sue.  The child toddled off into the class-room.
Phillotson saw his wife turn and take the note, and the bend of her
pretty head as she read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent
undue expression under fire of so many young eyes.  He could not see
her hands, but she changed her position, and soon the child returned,
bringing nothing in reply.  In a few minutes, however, one of Sue's
class appeared, with a little note similar to his own.  These words
only were pencilled therein:

   I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously made.

Phillotson looked more disturbed than before, and the meeting-place
of his brows twitched again.  In ten minutes he called up the child
he had just sent to her, and dispatched another missive:

   God knows I don't want to thwart you in any reasonable way.
   My whole thought is to make you comfortable and happy.  But
   I cannot agree to such a preposterous notion as your going
   to live with your lover.  You would lose everybody's respect
   and regard; and so should I!

After an interval a similar part was enacted in the class-room, and
an answer came:

   I know you mean my good.  But I don't want to be respectable!
   To produce "Human development in its richest diversity" (to
   quote your Humboldt) is to my mind far above respectability.
   No doubt my tastes are low--in your view--hopelessly low!
   If you won t let me go to him, will you grant me this one
   request--allow me to live in your house in a separate way?

To this he returned no answer.

She wrote again:

   I know what you think.  But cannot you have pity on me?  I beg
   you to; I implore you to be merciful!  I would not ask if I
   were not almost compelled by what I can't bear!  No poor woman
   has ever wished more than I that Eve had not fallen, so that
   (as the primitive Christians believed) some harmless mode of
   vegetation might have peopled Paradise.  But I won't trifle!
   Be kind to me--even though I have not been kind to you!  I
   will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.

Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:

   I do not wish to pain you.  How well you KNOW I don't! Give me
   a little time.  I am disposed to agree to your last request.

One line from her:

   Thank you from my heart, Richard.  I do not deserve your
   kindness.

All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.

But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart
in the house.  At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed
more composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of
their position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her
nature seemed strained like harp-strings.  She talked vaguely and
indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.

Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to
get together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities.  For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it.  He forgot time and place, and when
he remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o'clock.

His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other
side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his
wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place,
which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively.
He entered, and unconsciously began to undress.

There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement.  Before the
schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up
half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the
side away from him, which was towards the window.  This was somewhat
hidden by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her
flinging up the sash.  Before he had thought that she meant to do
more than get air she had mounted upon the sill and leapt out.  She
disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.

Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply
against the newel in his haste.  Opening the heavy door he ascended
the two or three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the
gravel before him lay a white heap.  Phillotson seized it in his
arms, and bringing Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he
gazed at her by the flapping light of the candle which he had set
down in the draught on the bottom stair.

She had certainly not broken her neck.  She looked at him with eyes
that seemed not to take him in; and though not particularly large in
general they appeared so now.  She pressed her side and rubbed her
arm, as if conscious of pain; then stood up, averting her face, in
evident distress at his gaze.

"Thank God--you are not killed!  Though it's not for want of
trying--not much hurt I hope?"

Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the
lowness of the old rooms and to the high level of the ground without.
Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow in the side she had apparently
incurred little harm.

"I was asleep, I think!" she began, her pale face still turned away
from him.  "And something frightened me--a terrible dream--I thought
I saw you--"  The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her,
and she was silent.

Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched
Phillotson flung it round her.  "Shall I help you upstairs?" he asked
drearily; for the significance of all this sickened him of himself
and of everything.

"No thank you, Richard.  I am very little hurt.  I can walk."

"You ought to lock your door," he mechanically said, as if lecturing
in school.  "Then no one could intrude even by accident."

"I have tried--it won't lock.  All the doors are out of order."

The aspect of things was not improved by her admission.  She ascended
the staircase slowly, the waving light of the candle shining on her.
Phillotson did not approach her, or attempt to ascend himself till he
heard her enter her room.  Then he fastened up the front door, and
returning, sat down on the lower stairs, holding the newel with one
hand, and bowing his face into the other.  Thus he remained for a
long long time--a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him;
till, raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that
the business of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or
no, he took the candle and went upstairs to his lonely room on the
other side of the landing.

No further incident touching the matter between them occurred till
the following evening, when, immediately school was over, Phillotson
walked out of Shaston, saying he required no tea, and not informing
Sue where he was going.  He descended from the town level by a steep
road in a north-westerly direction, and continued to move downwards
till the soil changed from its white dryness to a tough brown clay.
He was now on the low alluvial beds

   Where Duncliffe is the traveller's mark,
   And cloty Stour's a-rolling dark.

More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity of evening.
Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible

   On the grey-topp'd height
   Of Paladore, as pale day wore
   Away... [William Barnes.]

The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine as if
watching him, one of which windows was his own.  Above it he could
just discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity Church.  The air down
here, tempered by the thick damp bed of tenacious clay, was not as it
had been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when he had walked a
mile or two he was obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.

Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without hesitation
through the shade, as a man goes on, night or day, in a district over
which he has played as a boy.  He had walked altogether about four
and a half miles

   Where Stour receives her strength,
   From six cleere fountains fed, [Drayton.]

when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton--a
little town of three or four thousand inhabitants--where he went
on to the boys' school, and knocked at the door of the master's
residence.

A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson's inquiry if Mr.
Gillingham was at home, replied that he was, going at once off to his
own house, and leaving Phillotson to find his way in as he could.  He
discovered his friend putting away some books from which he had been
giving evening lessons.  The light of the paraffin lamp fell on
Phillotson's face--pale and wretched by contrast with his friend's,
who had a cool, practical look.  They had been schoolmates in
boyhood, and fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many
years before this time.

"Glad to see you, Dick!  But you don't look well!  Nothing the
matter?"

Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed the
cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.

"Why you haven't been here--let me see--since you were married?
I called, you know, but you were out; and upon my word it is such a
climb after dark that I have been waiting till the days are longer
before lumpering up again.  I am glad you didn't wait, however."

Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally
used a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.

"I've come, George, to explain to you my reasons for taking a step
that I am about to take, so that you, at least, will understand my
motives if other people question them anywhen--as they may, indeed
certainly will...  But anything is better than the present condition
of things.  God forbid that you should ever have such an experience
as mine!"

"Sit down.  You don't mean--anything wrong between you and Mrs.
Phillotson?"

"I do...  My wretched state is that I've a wife I love who not
only does not love me, but--but--  Well, I won't say.  I know her
feeling!  I should prefer hatred from her!"

"Ssh!"

"And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame as I. She
was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I took advantage of
her inexperience, and toled her out for walks, and got her to agree
to a long engagement before she well knew her own mind.  Afterwards
she saw somebody else, but she blindly fulfilled her engagement."

"Loving the other?"

"Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly; though her exact
feeling for him is a riddle to me--and to him too, I think--possibly
to herself.  She is one of the oddest creatures I ever met.  However,
I have been struck with these two facts; the extraordinary sympathy,
or similarity, between the pair.  He is her cousin, which perhaps
accounts for some of it.  They seem to be one person split in two!
And with her unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband, even
though she may like me as a friend, 'tis too much to bear longer.
She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to no purpose.
I cannot bear it--I cannot!  I can't answer her arguments--she has
read ten times as much as I.  Her intellect sparkles like diamonds,
while mine smoulders like brown paper...  She's one too many for me!"

"She'll get over it, good-now?"

"Never!  It is--but I won't go into it--there are reasons why she
never will.  At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave
me and go to him.  The climax came last night, when, owing to my
entering her room by accident, she jumped out of window--so strong
was her dread of me!  She pretended it was a dream, but that was
to soothe me.  Now when a woman jumps out of window without caring
whether she breaks her neck or no, she's not to be mistaken; and this
being the case I have come to a conclusion: that it is wrong to so
torture a fellow-creature any longer; and I won't be the inhuman
wretch to do it, cost what it may!"

"What--you'll let her go?  And with her lover?"

"Whom with is her matter.  I shall let her go; with him certainly,
if she wishes.  I know I may be wrong--I know I can't logically,
or religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers, or
harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in.  Only I know one
thing: something within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing
her.  I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such
a so-called preposterous request from his wife, the only course that
can possibly be regarded as right and proper and honourable in him is
to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder
her lover perhaps.  But is that essentially right, and proper, and
honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish?  I don't profess
to decide.  I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles
take care of themselves.  If a person who has blindly walked into a
quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible."

"But--you see, there's the question of neighbours and society--what
will happen if everybody--"

"Oh, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer!  I only see
what's under my eyes."

"Well--I don't agree with your instinct, Dick!" said Gillingham
gravely.  "I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that such a sedate,
plodding fellow as you should have entertained such a craze for a
moment.  You said when I called that she was puzzling and peculiar:
I think you are!"

"Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to be intrinsically
a good woman, while she has pleaded for release--been the man she has
knelt to and implored indulgence of?"

"I am thankful to say I haven't."

"Then I don't think you are in a position to give an opinion.  I
have been that man, and it makes all the difference in the world, if
one has any manliness or chivalry in him.  I had not the remotest
idea--living apart from women as I have done for so many years--that
merely taking a woman to church and putting a ring upon her finger
could by any possibility involve one in such a daily, continuous
tragedy as that now shared by her and me!"

"Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you, provided
she kept to herself.  But to go attended by a cavalier--that makes a
difference."

"Not a bit.  Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure her
present misery than be made to promise to keep apart from him?
All that is a question for herself.  It is not the same thing at
all as the treachery of living on with a husband and playing him
false...  However, she has not distinctly implied living with him
as wife, though I think she means to...  And, to the best of my
understanding, it is not an ignoble, merely animal, feeling between
the two: that is the worst of it; because it makes me think their
affection will be enduring.  I did not mean to confess to you that in
the first jealous weeks of my marriage, before I had come to my right
mind, I hid myself in the school one evening when they were together
there, and I heard what they said.  I am ashamed of it now, though
I suppose I was only exercising a legal right.  I found from their
manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into
their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour of grossness.
Their supreme desire is to be together--to share each other's
emotions, and fancies, and dreams."

"Platonic!"

"Well no.  Shelleyan would be nearer to it.  They remind me of--what
are their names--Laon and Cythna.  Also of Paul and Virginia a
little.  The more I reflect, the more ENTIRELY I am on their side!"

"But if people did as you want to do, there'd be a general domestic
disintegration.  The family would no longer be the social unit."

"Yes--I am all abroad, I suppose!" said Phillotson sadly.  "I was
never a very bright reasoner, you remember....  And yet, I don't see
why the woman and the children should not be the unit without the
man."

"By the Lord Harry!--Matriarchy! ...  Does SHE say all this too?"

"Oh no.  She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this--all in the
last twelve hours!"

"It will upset all received opinion hereabout.  Good God--what will
Shaston say!"

"I don't say that it won't.  I don't know--I don't know! ...  As I
say, I am only a feeler, not a reasoner."

"Now," said Gillingham, "let us take it quietly, and have something
to drink over it."  He went under the stairs, and produced a bottle
of cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer each.  "I think you are
rafted, and not yourself," he continued.  "Do go back and make up
your mind to put up with a few whims.  But keep her.  I hear on all
sides that she's a charming young thing."

"Ah yes!  That's the bitterness of it!  Well, I won't stay.  I have a
long walk before me."

Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting
expressed his hope that this consultation, singular as its subject
was, would be the renewal of their old comradeship.  "Stick to her!"
were his last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson; from
which his friend answered "Aye, aye!"

But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night, and no
sound was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour,
he said, "So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments
against it than those!"

"I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses--that's
what I think!" murmured Gillingham, as he walked back alone.

The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told Sue:

"You may go--with whom you will.  I absolutely and unconditionally
agree."

Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to Phillotson more
and more indubitably the true one.  His mild serenity at the sense
that he was doing his duty by a woman who was at his mercy almost
overpowered his grief at relinquishing her.

Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had
come--a cloudy evening with wind--which indeed was very seldom absent
in this elevated place.  How permanently it was imprinted upon his
vision; that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea;
a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and
marked by the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic
possibilities quite at variance with her times of buoyancy; a trying
of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either.  Her nervous
manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be injured by her course,
might have been interpreted by a stranger as displeasure that
Phillotson intruded his presence on her for the few brief minutes
that remained.

"You had better have a slice of ham or an egg, or something with your
tea?  You can't travel on a mouthful of bread and butter."

She took the slice he helped her to; and they discussed as they sat
trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he would find the
key of this or that cupboard, what little bills were paid, and what
not.

"I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue," he said, in a heroic
attempt to put her at her ease.  "So that being without a wife will
not really be irksome to me, as it might be to other men who have
had one a little while.  I have, too, this grand hobby in my head of
writing 'The Roman Antiquities of Wessex,' which will occupy all my
spare hours."

"If you will send me some of the manuscript to copy at any time,
as you used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!" she said with
amenable gentleness.  "I should much like to be some help to you
still--as a--f-f-friend."

Phillotson mused, and said: "No, I think we ought to be really
separate, if we are to be at all.  And for this reason, that I don't
wish to ask you any questions, and particularly wish you not to give
me information as to your movements, or even your address...  Now,
what money do you want?  You must have some, you know."

"Oh, of course, Richard, I couldn't think of having any of your money
to go away from you with!  I don't want any either.  I have enough of
my own to last me for a long while, and Jude will let me have--"

"I would rather not know anything about him, if you don't mind.
You are free, absolutely; and your course is your own."

"Very well.  But I'll just say that I have packed only a change or
two of my own personal clothing, and one or two little things besides
that are my very own.  I wish you would look into my trunk before it
is closed.  Besides that I have only a small parcel that will go into
Jude's portmanteau."

"Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your luggage!  I wish
you would take three-quarters of the household furniture.  I don't
want to be bothered with it.  I have a sort of affection for a little
of it that belonged to my poor mother and father.  But the rest you
are welcome to whenever you like to send for it."

"That I shall never do."

"You go by the six-thirty train, don't you?  It is now a quarter to
six."

"You...  You don't seem very sorry I am going, Richard!"

"Oh no--perhaps not."

"I like you much for how you have behaved.  It is a curious thing
that directly I have begun to regard you as not my husband, but as
my old teacher, I like you.  I won't be so affected as to say I love
you, because you know I don't, except as a friend.  But you do seem
that to me!"

Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these reflections, and
then the station omnibus came round to take her up.  Phillotson saw
her things put on the top, handed her in, and was obliged to make an
appearance of kissing her as he wished her good-bye, which she quite
understood and imitated.  From the cheerful manner in which they
parted the omnibus-man had no other idea than that she was going for
a short visit.

When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs and opened
the window in the direction the omnibus had taken.  Soon the noise of
its wheels died away.  He came down then, his face compressed like
that of one bearing pain; he put on his hat and went out, following
by the same route for nearly a mile.  Suddenly turning round he came
home.

He had no sooner entered than the voice of his friend Gillingham
greeted him from the front room.

"I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I walked in, and
made myself comfortable.  I said I would call, you remember."

"Yes.  I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly for coming
to-night."

"How is Mrs.--"

"She is quite well.  She is gone--just gone.  That's her tea-cup,
that she drank out of only an hour ago.  And that's the plate
she--"  Phillotson's throat got choked up, and he could not go on.
He turned and pushed the tea-things aside.

"Have you had any tea, by the by?" he asked presently in a renewed
voice.

"No--yes--never mind," said Gillingham, preoccupied.  "Gone, you say
she is?"

"Yes...  I would have died for her; but I wouldn't be cruel to her
in the name of the law.  She is, as I understand, gone to join her
lover.  What they are going to do I cannot say.  Whatever it may be
she has my full consent to."

There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson's pronouncement which
restrained his friend's comment.  "Shall I--leave you?" he asked.

"No, no.  It is a mercy to me that you have come.  I have some
articles to arrange and clear away.  Would you help me?"

Gillingham assented; and having gone to the upper rooms the
schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all Sue's things
that she had left behind, and laying them in a large box.  "She
wouldn't take all I wanted her to," he continued.  "But when I made
up my mind to her going to live in her own way I did make up my
mind."

"Some men would have stopped at an agreement to separate."

"I've gone into all that, and don't wish to argue it.  I was, and
am, the most old-fashioned man in the world on the question of
marriage--in fact I had never thought critically about its ethics
at all.  But certain facts stared me in the face, and I couldn't go
against them."

They went on with the packing silently.  When it was done Phillotson
closed the box and turned the key.

"There," he said.  "To adorn her in somebody's eyes; never again in
mine!"

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: When Sue leaves, she and Jude kiss passionately; reflecting on it, Jude sees it as a sign of his alienation from the ministry, an indication of his being unfit to profess the conventional beliefs. He thinks of the fact that Arabella hindered his aspirations to knowledge and now Sue has interfered with his desire to enter the church. He therefore burns all his theological works, so as not to leave himself in a hypocritical position. Sue berates herself for being weak but when she sees Phillotson again she tells him of Jude's holding her hand, not his kissing her. That night she sleeps apart from her husband and the next day asks if she can live away from him. She tells him that she married him because she could not think of anything else to do and was frightened by the scandal at the training college. She argues that "domestic laws should be made according to temperaments," when Phillotson says her request is irregular. When he asks what she means by living away from him, she says she meant living with Jude, not necessarily as his wife, but in any way she chooses. In a series of notes exchanged between their classrooms as they teach, Phillotson agrees only to letting her live apart from him in the house. When one night Phillotson mistakenly enters Sue's room, she leaps out of the window and slightly injures herself, later explaining to her husband that her action was caused by a dream, an explanation he doesn't believe. Phillotson goes to see his teacher friend Gillingham, in a nearby town, to have someone to talk to. Admitting that Jude and Sue "seem to be one person split in two," he tells his friend that he has decided to let Sue go, her jumping out the window being the final sign of her unwillingness to stay with him. Against Gillingham's arguments, Phillotson can only say that his instinct tells him to set Sue free, though it is opposed to all he believes in. He tells Sue of his decision, and on the day she is to leave they discuss only practical matters. After Sue leaves, Gillingham comes to call.