prompt:
Chapter: The seventy young women, of ages varying in the main from nineteen to
one-and-twenty, though several were older, who at this date filled
the species of nunnery known as the Training-School at Melchester,
formed a very mixed community, which included the daughters of
mechanics, curates, surgeons, shopkeepers, farmers, dairy-men,
soldiers, sailors, and villagers.  They sat in the large school-room
of the establishment on the evening previously described, and word
was passed round that Sue Bridehead had not come in at closing-time.

"She went out with her young man," said a second-year's student, who
knew about young men.  "And Miss Traceley saw her at the station with
him.  She'll have it hot when she does come."

"She said he was her cousin," observed a youthful new girl.

"That excuse has been made a little too often in this school to be
effectual in saving our souls," said the head girl of the year,
drily.

The fact was that, only twelve months before, there had occurred
a lamentable seduction of one of the pupils who had made the same
statement in order to gain meetings with her lover.  The affair had
created a scandal, and the management had consequently been rough on
cousins ever since.

At nine o'clock the names were called, Sue's being pronounced three
times sonorously by Miss Traceley without eliciting an answer.

At a quarter past nine the seventy stood up to sing the "Evening
Hymn," and then knelt down to prayers.  After prayers they went in to
supper, and every girl's thought was, Where is Sue Bridehead?  Some
of the students, who had seen Jude from the window, felt that they
would not mind risking her punishment for the pleasure of being
kissed by such a kindly-faced young man.  Hardly one among them
believed in the cousinship.

Half an hour later they all lay in their cubicles, their tender
feminine faces upturned to the flaring gas-jets which at intervals
stretched down the long dormitories, every face bearing the legend
"The Weaker" upon it, as the penalty of the sex wherein they were
moulded, which by no possible exertion of their willing hearts and
abilities could be made strong while the inexorable laws of nature
remain what they are.  They formed a pretty, suggestive, pathetic
sight, of whose pathos and beauty they were themselves unconscious,
and would not discover till, amid the storms and strains of
after-years, with their injustice, loneliness, child-bearing, and
bereavement, their minds would revert to this experience as to
something which had been allowed to slip past them insufficiently
regarded.

One of the mistresses came in to turn out the lights, and before
doing so gave a final glance at Sue's cot, which remained empty, and
at her little dressing-table at the foot, which, like all the rest,
was ornamented with various girlish trifles, framed photographs being
not the least conspicuous among them.  Sue's table had a moderate
show, two men in their filigree and velvet frames standing together
beside her looking-glass.

"Who are these men--did she ever say?" asked the mistress.  "Strictly
speaking, relations' portraits only are allowed on these tables, you
know."

"One--the middle-aged man," said a student in the next bed--"is the
schoolmaster she served under--Mr. Phillotson."

"And the other--this undergraduate in cap and gown--who is he?"

"He is a friend, or was.  She has never told his name."

"Was it either of these two who came for her?"

"No."

"You are sure 'twas not the undergraduate?"

"Quite.  He was a young man with a black beard."

The lights were promptly extinguished, and till they fell asleep the
girls indulged in conjectures about Sue, and wondered what games
she had carried on in London and at Christminster before she came
here, some of the more restless ones getting out of bed and looking
from the mullioned windows at the vast west front of the cathedral
opposite, and the spire rising behind it.

When they awoke the next morning they glanced into Sue's nook,
to find it still without a tenant.  After the early lessons by
gas-light, in half-toilet, and when they had come up to dress for
breakfast, the bell of the entrance gate was heard to ring loudly.
The mistress of the dormitory went away, and presently came back to
say that the principal's orders were that nobody was to speak to
Bridehead without permission.

When, accordingly, Sue came into the dormitory to hastily tidy
herself, looking flushed and tired, she went to her cubicle in
silence, none of them coming out to greet her or to make inquiry.
When they had gone downstairs they found that she did not follow them
into the dining-hall to breakfast, and they then learnt that she had
been severely reprimanded, and ordered to a solitary room for a week,
there to be confined, and take her meals, and do all her reading.

At this the seventy murmured, the sentence being, they thought, too
severe.  A round robin was prepared and sent in to the principal,
asking for a remission of Sue's punishment.  No notice was taken.
Towards evening, when the geography mistress began dictating her
subject, the girls in the class sat with folded arms.

"You mean that you are not going to work?" said the mistress at last.
"I may as well tell you that it has been ascertained that the young
man Bridehead stayed out with was not her cousin, for the very
good reason that she has no such relative.  We have written to
Christminster to ascertain."

"We are willing to take her word," said the head girl.

"This young man was discharged from his work at Christminster for
drunkenness and blasphemy in public-houses, and he has come here to
live, entirely to be near her."

However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the mistress left
the room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.

Presently, towards dusk, the pupils, as they sat, heard exclamations
from the first-year's girls in an adjoining classroom, and one rushed
in to say that Sue Bridehead had got out of the back window of the
room in which she had been confined, escaped in the dark across the
lawn, and disappeared.  How she had managed to get out of the garden
nobody could tell, as it was bounded by the river at the bottom, and
the side door was locked.

They went and looked at the empty room, the casement between the
middle mullions of which stood open.  The lawn was again searched
with a lantern, every bush and shrub being examined, but she was
nowhere hidden.  Then the porter of the front gate was interrogated,
and on reflection he said that he remembered hearing a sort of
splashing in the stream at the back, but he had taken no notice,
thinking some ducks had come down the river from above.

"She must have walked through the river!" said a mistress.

"Or drownded herself," said the porter.

The mind of the matron was horrified--not so much at the possible
death of Sue as at the possible half-column detailing that event in
all the newspapers, which, added to the scandal of the year before,
would give the college an unenviable notoriety for many months to
come.

More lanterns were procured, and the river examined; and then, at
last, on the opposite shore, which was open to the fields, some
little boot-tracks were discerned in the mud, which left no doubt
that the too excitable girl had waded through a depth of water
reaching nearly to her shoulders--for this was the chief river of the
county, and was mentioned in all the geography books with respect.
As Sue had not brought disgrace upon the school by drowning herself,
the matron began to speak superciliously of her, and to express
gladness that she was gone.

On the self-same evening Jude sat in his lodgings by the Close Gate.
Often at this hour after dusk he would enter the silent Close, and
stand opposite the house that contained Sue, and watch the shadows of
the girls' heads passing to and fro upon the blinds, and wish he had
nothing else to do but to sit reading and learning all day what many
of the thoughtless inmates despised.  But to-night, having finished
tea and brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of the
Twenty-ninth Volume of Pusey's Library of the Fathers, a set of books
which he had purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price that seemed
to him to be one of miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work. He
fancied he heard something rattle lightly against his window; then he
heard it again.  Certainly somebody had thrown gravel.  He rose and
gently lifted the sash.

"Jude!" (from below).

"Sue!"

"Yes--it is!  Can I come up without being seen?"

"Oh yes!"

"Then don't come down.  Shut the window."

Jude waited, knowing that she could enter easily enough, the front
door being opened merely by a knob which anybody could turn, as
in most old country towns.  He palpitated at the thought that she
had fled to him in her trouble as he had fled to her in his. What
counterparts they were!  He unlatched the door of his room, heard a
stealthy rustle on the dark stairs, and in a moment she appeared in
the light of his lamp.  He went up to seize her hand, and found she
was clammy as a marine deity, and that her clothes clung to her like
the robes upon the figures in the Parthenon frieze.

"I'm so cold!" she said through her chattering teeth.  "Can I come by
your fire, Jude?"

She crossed to his little grate and very little fire, but as the
water dripped from her as she moved, the idea of drying herself was
absurd.  "Whatever have you done, darling?" he asked, with alarm, the
tender epithet slipping out unawares.

"Walked through the largest river in the county--that's what I've
done!  They locked me up for being out with you; and it seemed so
unjust that I couldn't bear it, so I got out of the window and
escaped across the stream!"  She had begun the explanation in her
usual slightly independent tones, but before she had finished the
thin pink lips trembled, and she could hardly refrain from crying.

"Dear Sue!" he said.  "You must take off all your things!  And let me
see--you must borrow some from the landlady. I'll ask her."

"No, no!  Don't let her know, for God's sake!  We are so near the
school that they'll come after me!"

"Then you must put on mine.  You don't mind?"

"Oh no."

"My Sunday suit, you know.  It is close here."  In fact, everything
was close and handy in Jude's single chamber, because there was not
room for it to be otherwise.  He opened a drawer, took out his best
dark suit, and giving the garments a shake, said, "Now, how long
shall I give you?"

"Ten minutes."

Jude left the room and went into the street, where he walked up and
down.  A clock struck half-past seven, and he returned.  Sitting in
his only arm-chair he saw a slim and fragile being masquerading as
himself on a Sunday, so pathetic in her defencelessness that his
heart felt big with the sense of it.  On two other chairs before the
fire were her wet garments. She blushed as he sat down beside her,
but only for a moment.

"I suppose, Jude, it is odd that you should see me like this and all
my things hanging there?  Yet what nonsense!  They are only a woman's
clothes--sexless cloth and linen...  I wish I didn't feel so ill and
sick!  Will you dry my clothes now?  Please do, Jude, and I'll get a
lodging by and by.  It is not late yet."

"No, you shan't, if you are ill.  You must stay here.  Dear, dear
Sue, what can I get for you?"

"I don't know!  I can't help shivering.  I wish I could get warm."
Jude put on her his great-coat in addition, and then ran out to the
nearest public-house, whence he returned with a little bottle in his
hand.  "Here's six of best brandy," he said.  "Now you drink it,
dear; all of it."

"I can't out of the bottle, can I?"  Jude fetched the glass from the
dressing-table, and administered the spirit in some water.  She
gasped a little, but gulped it down, and lay back in the armchair.

She then began to relate circumstantially her experiences since
they had parted; but in the middle of her story her voice faltered,
her head nodded, and she ceased.  She was in a sound sleep.  Jude,
dying of anxiety lest she should have caught a chill which might
permanently injure her, was glad to hear the regular breathing.  He
softly went nearer to her, and observed that a warm flush now rosed
her hitherto blue cheeks, and felt that her hanging hand was no
longer cold.  Then he stood with his back to the fire regarding her,
and saw in her almost a divinity.

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

completion: There is much speculation at the training college when Sue does not return that evening at prayer time. Everyone wonders about the young man she has gone out with, and some of them are convinced that Jude is only posing as her cousin. The situation takes a serious turn because a similar incident occurred the year before: a young man had managed to seduce a student of the same college, maintaining that he was her cousin. The mistress inquires about the two photographs on Sue's dressing table. One is of Mr. Phillotson, and the other is of an unknown undergraduate. The next morning, when Sue does return, she is punished and kept in solitary confinement. The other students feel the punishment is too harsh and prepare to protest. In the evening it is discovered that Sue has escaped from a back window. She turns up at Jude's place. She is soaked and shivering with cold. Jude immediately takes her in and offers her some dry clothes and brandy. Sue is so tired that she falls asleep while relating her story.


prompt:
Chapter: Jude's reverie was interrupted by the creak of footsteps ascending
the stairs.

He whisked Sue's clothing from the chair where it was drying, thrust
it under the bed, and sat down to his book.  Somebody knocked and
opened the door immediately.  It was the landlady.

"Oh, I didn't know whether you was in or not, Mr. Fawley.  I
wanted to know if you would require supper.  I see you've a young
gentleman--"

"Yes, ma'am. But I think I won't come down to-night. Will you bring
supper up on a tray, and I'll have a cup of tea as well."

It was Jude's custom to go downstairs to the kitchen, and eat his
meals with the family, to save trouble.  His landlady brought up the
supper, however, on this occasion, and he took it from her at the
door.

When she had descended he set the teapot on the hob, and drew out
Sue's clothes anew; but they were far from dry.  A thick woollen
gown, he found, held a deal of water.  So he hung them up again, and
enlarged his fire and mused as the steam from the garments went up
the chimney.

Suddenly she said, "Jude!"

"Yes.  All right.  How do you feel now?"

"Better.  Quite well.  Why, I fell asleep, didn't I?  What time is
it?  Not late surely?"

"It is past ten."

"Is it really?  What SHALL I do!" she said, starting up.

"Stay where you are."

"Yes; that's what I want to do.  But I don't know what they would
say!  And what will you do?"

"I am going to sit here by the fire all night, and read.  To-morrow
is Sunday, and I haven't to go out anywhere.  Perhaps you will be
saved a severe illness by resting there.  Don't be frightened.  I'm
all right.  Look here, what I have got for you.  Some supper."

When she had sat upright she breathed plaintively and said, "I do
feel rather weak still.  I thought I was well; and I ought not to be
here, ought I?"  But the supper fortified her somewhat, and when she
had had some tea and had lain back again she was bright and cheerful.

The tea must have been green, or too long drawn, for she seemed
preternaturally wakeful afterwards, though Jude, who had not taken
any, began to feel heavy; till her conversation fixed his attention.

"You called me a creature of civilization, or something, didn't you?"
she said, breaking a silence.  "It was very odd you should have done
that."

"Why?"

"Well, because it is provokingly wrong.  I am a sort of negation of
it."

"You are very philosophical.  'A negation' is profound talking."

"Is it?  Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch
of raillery.

"No--not learned.  Only you don't talk quite like a girl--well, a
girl who has had no advantages."

"I have had advantages.  I don't know Latin and Greek, though I know
the grammars of those tongues.  But I know most of the Greek and
Latin classics through translations, and other books too.  I read
Lempriere, Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Lucian, Beaumont and Fletcher,
Boccaccio, Scarron, De Brantome, Sterne, De Foe, Smollett, Fielding,
Shakespeare, the Bible, and other such; and found that all interest
in the unwholesome part of those books ended with its mystery."

"You have read more than I," he said with a sigh.  "How came you to
read some of those queerer ones?"

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "it was by accident.  My life has been
entirely shaped by what people call a peculiarity in me.  I have no
fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them--one
or two of them particularly--almost as one of their own sex.  I mean
I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel--to be on
their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no average man--no
man short of a sensual savage--will molest a woman by day or night,
at home or abroad, unless she invites him.  Until she says by a look
'Come on' he is always afraid to, and if you never say it, or look
it, he never comes.  However, what I was going to say is that when I
was eighteen I formed a friendly intimacy with an undergraduate at
Christminster, and he taught me a great deal, and lent me books which
I should never have got hold of otherwise."

"Is your friendship broken off?"

"Oh yes.  He died, poor fellow, two or three years after he had taken
his degree and left Christminster."

"You saw a good deal of him, I suppose?"

"Yes.  We used to go about together--on walking tours, reading tours,
and things of that sort--like two men almost.  He asked me to live
with him, and I agreed to by letter.  But when I joined him in London
I found he meant a different thing from what I meant.  He wanted me
to be his mistress, in fact, but I wasn't in love with him--and on
my saying I should go away if he didn't agree to MY plan, he did
so.  We shared a sitting-room for fifteen months; and he became a
leader-writer for one of the great London dailies; till he was taken
ill, and had to go abroad.  He said I was breaking his heart by
holding out against him so long at such close quarters; he could
never have believed it of woman.  I might play that game once too
often, he said.  He came home merely to die.  His death caused a
terrible remorse in me for my cruelty--though I hope he died of
consumption and not of me entirely.  I went down to Sandbourne
to his funeral, and was his only mourner.  He left me a little
money--because I broke his heart, I suppose.  That's how men
are--so much better than women!"

"Good heavens!--what did you do then?"

"Ah--now you are angry with me!" she said, a contralto note of
tragedy coming suddenly into her silvery voice.  "I wouldn't have
told you if I had known!"

"No, I am not.  Tell me all."

"Well, I invested his money, poor fellow, in a bubble scheme, and
lost it.  I lived about London by myself for some time, and then I
returned to Christminster, as my father-- who was also in London, and
had started as an art metal-worker near Long-Acre--wouldn't have me
back; and I got that occupation in the artist-shop where you found
me...  I said you didn't know how bad I was!"

Jude looked round upon the arm-chair and its occupant, as if to read
more carefully the creature he had given shelter to.  His voice
trembled as he said: "However you have lived, Sue, I believe you are
as innocent as you are unconventional!"

"I am not particularly innocent, as you see, now that I have

                           'twitched the robe
   From that blank lay-figure your fancy draped,'"

said she, with an ostensible sneer, though he could hear that she was
brimming with tears.  "But I have never yielded myself to any lover,
if that's what you mean!  I have remained as I began."

"I quite believe you.  But some women would not have remained as they
began."

"Perhaps not.  Better women would not.  People say I must be
cold-natured--sexless--on account of it.  But I won't have it!
Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most
self-contained in their daily lives."

"Have you told Mr. Phillotson about this university scholar friend?"

"Yes--long ago.  I have never made any secret of it to anybody."

"What did he say?"

"He did not pass any criticism--only said I was everything to him,
whatever I did; and things like that."

Jude felt much depressed; she seemed to get further and further away
from him with her strange ways and curious unconsciousness of gender.

"Aren't you REALLY vexed with me, dear Jude?" she suddenly asked, in
a voice of such extraordinary tenderness that it hardly seemed to
come from the same woman who had just told her story so lightly.  "I
would rather offend anybody in the world than you, I think!"

"I don't know whether I am vexed or not.  I know I care very much
about you!"

"I care as much for you as for anybody I ever met."

"You don't care MORE!  There, I ought not to say that.  Don't answer
it!"

There was another long silence.  He felt that she was treating
him cruelly, though he could not quite say in what way.  Her very
helplessness seemed to make her so much stronger than he.

"I am awfully ignorant on general matters, although I have worked so
hard," he said, to turn the subject.  "I am absorbed in theology, you
know.  And what do you think I should be doing just about now, if you
weren't here?  I should be saying my evening prayers.  I suppose you
wouldn't like--"

"Oh no, no," she answered, "I would rather not, if you don't mind.
I should seem so--such a hypocrite."

"I thought you wouldn't join, so I didn't propose it.  You must
remember that I hope to be a useful minister some day."

"To be ordained, I think you said?"

"Yes."

"Then you haven't given up the idea?--I thought that perhaps you had
by this time."

"Of course not.  I fondly thought at first that you felt as I do
about that, as you were so mixed up in Christminster Anglicanism.
And Mr. Phillotson--"

"I have no respect for Christminster whatever, except, in a qualified
degree, on its intellectual side," said Sue Bridehead earnestly.  "My
friend I spoke of took that out of me.  He was the most irreligious
man I ever knew, and the most moral.  And intellect at Christminster
is new wine in old bottles.  The mediaevalism of Christminster must
go, be sloughed off, or Christminster itself will have to go.  To
be sure, at times one couldn't help having a sneaking liking for
the traditions of the old faith, as preserved by a section of the
thinkers there in touching and simple sincerity; but when I was in my
saddest, rightest mind I always felt,

   'O ghastly glories of saints, dead limbs of gibbeted Gods!'"...

"Sue, you are not a good friend of mine to talk like that!"

"Then I won't, dear Jude!"  The emotional throat-note had come back,
and she turned her face away.

"I still think Christminster has much that is glorious; though I
was resentful because I couldn't get there."  He spoke gently, and
resisted his impulse to pique her on to tears.

"It is an ignorant place, except as to the townspeople, artizans,
drunkards, and paupers," she said, perverse still at his differing
from her.  "THEY see life as it is, of course; but few of the people
in the colleges do.  You prove it in your own person.  You are one
of the very men Christminster was intended for when the colleges
were founded; a man with a passion for learning, but no money, or
opportunities, or friends.  But you were elbowed off the pavement
by the millionaires' sons."

"Well, I can do without what it confers.  I care for something
higher."

"And I for something broader, truer," she insisted.  "At present
intellect in Christminster is pushing one way, and religion the
other; and so they stand stock-still, like two rams butting each
other."

"What would Mr. Phillotson--"

"It is a place full of fetishists and ghost-seers!"

He noticed that whenever he tried to speak of the schoolmaster she
turned the conversation to some generalizations about the offending
university.  Jude was extremely, morbidly, curious about her life as
Phillotson's _protegee_ and betrothed; yet she would not enlighten
him.

"Well, that's just what I am, too," he said.  "I am fearful of life,
spectre-seeing always."

"But you are good and dear!" she murmured.

His heart bumped, and he made no reply.

"You are in the Tractarian stage just now, are you not?" she added,
putting on flippancy to hide real feeling, a common trick with her.
"Let me see--when was I there?  In the year eighteen hundred and--"

"There's a sarcasm in that which is rather unpleasant to me, Sue.
Now will you do what I want you to?  At this time I read a chapter,
and then say prayers, as I told you.  Now will you concentrate your
attention on any book of these you like, and sit with your back to
me, and leave me to my custom?  You are sure you won't join me?"

"I'll look at you."

"No. Don't tease, Sue!"

"Very well--I'll do just as you bid me, and I won't vex you, Jude,"
she replied, in the tone of a child who was going to be good for ever
after, turning her back upon him accordingly.  A small Bible other
than the one he was using lay near her, and during his retreat she
took it up, and turned over the leaves.

"Jude," she said brightly, when he had finished and come back to her;
"will you let me make you a NEW New Testament, like the one I made
for myself at Christminster?"

"Oh yes.  How was that made?"

"I altered my old one by cutting up all the Epistles and Gospels into
separate _brochures_, and rearranging them in chronological order as
written, beginning the book with Thessalonians, following on with the
Epistles, and putting the Gospels much further on.  Then I had the
volume rebound.  My university friend Mr.--but never mind his name,
poor boy--said it was an excellent idea.  I know that reading it
afterwards made it twice as interesting as before, and twice as
understandable."

"H'm!" said Jude, with a sense of sacrilege.

"And what a literary enormity this is," she said, as she glanced
into the pages of Solomon's Song.  "I mean the synopsis at the head
of each chapter, explaining away the real nature of that rhapsody.
You needn't be alarmed: nobody claims inspiration for the chapter
headings.  Indeed, many divines treat them with contempt.  It seems
the drollest thing to think of the four-and-twenty elders, or
bishops, or whatever number they were, sitting with long faces and
writing down such stuff."

Jude looked pained.  "You are quite Voltairean!" he murmured.

"Indeed?  Then I won't say any more, except that people have no
right to falsify the Bible!  I HATE such hum-bug as could attempt to
plaster over with ecclesiastical abstractions such ecstatic, natural,
human love as lies in that great and passionate song!"  Her speech
had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes
moist.  "I WISH I had a friend here to support me; but nobody is ever
on my side!"

"But my dear Sue, my very dear Sue, I am not against you!" he said,
taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling
into mere argument.

"Yes you are, yes you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he
might not see her brimming eyes.  "You are on the side of the people
in the training-school--at least you seem almost to be!  What I
insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy
beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: '_The Church
professeth her faith_,' is supremely ridiculous!"

"Well then, let it be!  You make such a personal matter of
everything!  I am--only too inclined just now to apply the words
profanely.  You know YOU are fairest among women to me, come to
that!"

"But you are not to say it now!"  Sue replied, her voice changing
to its softest note of severity.  Then their eyes met, and they
shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of
quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of
crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible.

"I won't disturb your convictions--I really won't!" she went on
soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she.  "But I did
want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you,
and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I--shall I confess it?--thought
that man might be you.  But you take so much tradition on trust that
I don't know what to say."

"Well, dear; I suppose one must take some things on trust.  Life
isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before
you believe it.  I take Christianity."

"Well, perhaps you might take something worse."

"Indeed I might.  Perhaps I have done so!"  He thought of Arabella.

"I won't ask what, because we are going to be VERY nice with each
other, aren't we, and never, never, vex each other any more?"  She
looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his
breast.

"I shall always care for you!" said Jude.

"And I for you.  Because you are single-hearted, and forgiving to
your faulty and tiresome little Sue!"

He looked away, for that epicene tenderness of hers was too
harrowing.  Was it that which had broken the heart of the poor
leader-writer; and was he to be the next one? ...  But Sue was so
dear! ...  If he could only get over the sense of her sex, as she
seemed to be able to do so easily of his, what a comrade she would
make; for their difference of opinion on conjectural subjects only
drew them closer together on matters of daily human experience.  She
was nearer to him than any other woman he had ever met, and he could
scarcely believe that time, creed, or absence, would ever divide him
from her.

But his grief at her incredulities returned.  They sat on till she
fell asleep again, and he nodded in his chair likewise.  Whenever
he aroused himself he turned her things, and made up the fire anew.
About six o'clock he awoke completely, and lighting a candle, found
that her clothes were dry.  Her chair being a far more comfortable
one than his she still slept on inside his great-coat, looking warm
as a new bun and boyish as a Ganymede.  Placing the garments by her
and touching her on the shoulder he went downstairs, and washed
himself by starlight in the yard.

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

completion: When Sue gets up, Jude gives her some supper and they begin talking. Sue does not know Latin or Greek but has read most of the classics in translation along with much other serious literature. She confides in Jude that she developed her literary preferences from a Christminster undergraduate with whom she became very friendly at the age of eighteen. She had even lived with him in London for fifteen months, although not as a lover. They would read and go on trips together, and he later became a reporter for a London newspaper. He eventually died of tuberculosis and left Sue some of his money. Jude is astonished at Sue's story and is puzzled at the strange combination of innocence and unconventionality in her. When Jude asks her to join him in his nightly prayers, she refuses vehemently, criticizing religion and the intellectual life of Christminster. She offers to make a new copy of the New Testament for Jude, arranging the books chronologically, and is particularly critical of the conventional Christian interpretation of the Song of Solomon. They are on the verge of quarreling when Sue confesses she had expected Jude to be a kind of comrade and intellectual companion. Now she finds him too conservative. Jude, in turn, wishes that like her, he could accept her as a friend and forget her sex. They both eventually drop off to sleep in their chairs, as they are overcome with fatigue.


prompt:
Chapter: When he returned she was dressed as usual.

"Now could I get out without anybody seeing me?" she asked.  "The
town is not yet astir."

"But you have had no breakfast."

"Oh, I don't want any!  I fear I ought not to have run away from that
school!  Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don't
they?  What Mr. Phillotson will say I don't know!  It was quite by
his wish that I went there.  He is the only man in the world for whom
I have any respect or fear.  I hope he'll forgive me; but he'll scold
me dreadfully, I expect!"

"I'll go to him and explain--" began Jude.

"Oh no, you shan't. I don't care for him!  He may think what he
likes--I shall do just as I choose!"

"But you just this moment said--"

"Well, if I did, I shall do as I like for all him!  I have thought of
what I shall do--go to the sister of one of my fellow-students in the
training-school, who has asked me to visit her.  She has a school
near Shaston, about eighteen miles from here--and I shall stay there
till this has blown over, and I get back to the training-school
again."

At the last moment he persuaded her to let him make her a cup of
coffee, in a portable apparatus he kept in his room for use on rising
to go to his work every day before the household was astir.

"Now a dew-bit to eat with it," he said; "and off we go.  You can
have a regular breakfast when you get there."

They went quietly out of the house, Jude accompanying her to the
station.  As they departed along the street a head was thrust out
of an upper window of his lodging and quickly withdrawn.  Sue still
seemed sorry for her rashness, and to wish she had not rebelled;
telling him at parting that she would let him know as soon as she
got re-admitted to the training-school.  They stood rather miserably
together on the platform; and it was apparent that he wanted to say
more.

"I want to tell you something--two things," he said hurriedly as the
train came up.  "One is a warm one, the other a cold one!"

"Jude," she said.  "I know one of them.  And you mustn't!"

"What?"

"You mustn't love me.  You are to like me--that's all!"

Jude's face became so full of complicated glooms that hers was
agitated in sympathy as she bade him adieu through the carriage
window.  And then the train moved on, and waving her pretty hand to
him she vanished away.

Melchester was a dismal place enough for Jude that Sunday of her
departure, and the Close so hateful that he did not go once to the
cathedral services.  The next morning there came a letter from her,
which, with her usual promptitude, she had written directly she had
reached her friend's house.  She told him of her safe arrival and
comfortable quarters, and then added:--

   What I really write about, dear Jude, is something I said
   to you at parting.  You had been so very good and kind to
   me that when you were out of sight I felt what a cruel and
   ungrateful woman I was to say it, and it has reproached me
   ever since.  IF YOU WANT TO LOVE ME, JUDE, YOU MAY: I don't
   mind at all; and I'll never say again that you mustn't!

   Now I won't write any more about that.  You do forgive your
   thoughtless friend for her cruelty? and won't make her
   miserable by saying you don't?--Ever,

   SUE.

It would be superfluous to say what his answer was; and how he
thought what he would have done had he been free, which should have
rendered a long residence with a female friend quite unnecessary for
Sue.  He felt he might have been pretty sure of his own victory if
it had come to a conflict between Phillotson and himself for the
possession of her.

Yet Jude was in danger of attaching more meaning to Sue's impulsive
note than it really was intended to bear.

After the lapse of a few days he found himself hoping that she would
write again.  But he received no further communication; and in the
intensity of his solicitude he sent another note, suggesting that he
should pay her a visit some Sunday, the distance being under eighteen
miles.

He expected a reply on the second morning after despatching his
missive; but none came.  The third morning arrived; the postman did
not stop.  This was Saturday, and in a feverish state of anxiety
about her he sent off three brief lines stating that he was coming
the following day, for he felt sure something had happened.

His first and natural thought had been that she was ill from her
immersion; but it soon occurred to him that somebody would have
written for her in such a case.  Conjectures were put an end to by
his arrival at the village school-house near Shaston on the bright
morning of Sunday, between eleven and twelve o'clock, when the parish
was as vacant as a desert, most of the inhabitants having gathered
inside the church, whence their voices could occasionally be heard in
unison.

A little girl opened the door.  "Miss Bridehead is up-stairs," she
said.  "And will you please walk up to her?"

"Is she ill?" asked Jude hastily.

"Only a little--not very."

Jude entered and ascended.  On reaching the landing a voice told him
which way to turn--the voice of Sue calling his name.  He passed the
doorway, and found her lying in a little bed in a room a dozen feet
square.

"Oh, Sue!" he cried, sitting down beside her and taking her hand.
"How is this!  You couldn't write?"

"No--it wasn't that!" she answered.  "I did catch a bad cold--but I
could have written.  Only I wouldn't!"

"Why not?--frightening me like this!"

"Yes--that was what I was afraid of!  But I had decided not to write
to you any more.  They won't have me back at the school--that's why I
couldn't write.  Not the fact, but the reason!"

"Well?"

"They not only won't have me, but they gave me a parting piece of
advice--"

"What?"

She did not answer directly.  "I vowed I never would tell you,
Jude--it is so vulgar and distressing!"

"Is it about us?"

"Yes."

"But do tell me!"

"Well--somebody has sent them baseless reports about us, and they
say you and I ought to marry as soon as possible, for the sake of my
reputation! ...  There--now I have told you, and I wish I hadn't!"

"Oh, poor Sue!"

"I don't think of you like that means!  It did just OCCUR to me to
regard you in the way they think I do, but I hadn't begun to.  I HAVE
recognized that the cousinship was merely nominal, since we met as
total strangers.  But my marrying you, dear Jude--why, of course,
if I had reckoned upon marrying you I shouldn't have come to you so
often!  And I never supposed you thought of such a thing as marrying
me till the other evening; when I began to fancy you did love me a
little.  Perhaps I ought not to have been so intimate with you.  It
is all my fault.  Everything is my fault always!"

The speech seemed a little forced and unreal, and they regarded each
other with a mutual distress.

"I was so blind at first!" she went on.  "I didn't see what you felt
at all.  Oh, you have been unkind to me--you have--to look upon me
as a sweetheart without saying a word, and leaving me to discover it
myself!  Your attitude to me has become known; and naturally they
think we've been doing wrong!  I'll never trust you again!"

"Yes, Sue," he said simply; "I am to blame--more than you think.  I
was quite aware that you did not suspect till within the last meeting
or two what I was feeling about you.  I admit that our meeting as
strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort
of subterfuge to avail myself of it.  But don't you think I deserve a
little consideration for concealing my wrong, very wrong, sentiments,
since I couldn't help having them?"

She turned her eyes doubtfully towards him, and then looked away as
if afraid she might forgive him.

By every law of nature and sex a kiss was the only rejoinder that
fitted the mood and the moment, under the suasion of which Sue's
undemonstrative regard of him might not inconceivably have changed
its temperature.  Some men would have cast scruples to the winds,
and ventured it, oblivious both of Sue's declaration of her neutral
feelings, and of the pair of autographs in the vestry chest of
Arabella's parish church.  Jude did not.  He had, in fact, come in
part to tell his own fatal story.  It was upon his lips; yet at the
hour of this distress he could not disclose it.  He preferred to
dwell upon the recognized barriers between them.

"Of course--I know you don't--care about me in any particular way,"
he sorrowed.  "You ought not, and you are right.  You belong to--Mr.
Phillotson.  I suppose he has been to see you?"

"Yes," she said shortly, her face changing a little.  "Though I
didn't ask him to come.  You are glad, of course, that he has been!
But I shouldn't care if he didn't come any more!"

It was very perplexing to her lover that she should be piqued at his
honest acquiescence in his rival, if Jude's feelings of love were
deprecated by her.  He went on to something else.

"This will blow over, dear Sue," he said.  "The training-school
authorities are not all the world.  You can get to be a student in
some other, no doubt."

"I'll ask Mr. Phillotson," she said decisively.

Sue's kind hostess now returned from church, and there was no more
intimate conversation.  Jude left in the afternoon, hopelessly
unhappy.  But he had seen her, and sat with her.  Such intercourse
as that would have to content him for the remainder of his life.
The lesson of renunciation it was necessary and proper that he, as
a parish priest, should learn.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her,
and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious.
Then, in illustration of what he had begun to discern as one of her
redeeming characteristics there came promptly a note, which she must
have written almost immediately he had gone from her:

   Forgive me for my petulance yesterday!  I was horrid to
   you; I know it, and I feel perfectly miserable at my
   horridness.  It was so dear of you not to be angry!  Jude,
   please still keep me as your friend and associate, with
   all my faults.  I'll try not to be like it again.

   I am coming to Melchester on Saturday, to get my things
   away from the T. S., &c.  I could walk with you for half
   an hour, if you would like?--Your repentant

   SUE.

Jude forgave her straightway, and asked her to call for him at the
cathedral works when she came.

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

completion: In the cold light of morning, Sue takes stock of her situation and regrets her rashness in running away from the training college. She is also afraid of Phillotson's reaction to her departure. She decides to stay with a friend at Shaston, hoping to return later to the training college, after her escapade has been forgotten. Jude accompanies her to the station and is about to confess his love for her and tell her about Arabella, but Sue cautions him, saying that he is not to love her. The day after her departure Sue sends him a short note from Shaston, saying that she now grants him permission to love her. Jude goes to visit her at Shaston on Sunday and finds her sick in bed. Assuming that she is Jude's mistress, they have refused to take her back at the training college. Jude is distressed; he wants to tell her about Arabella but cannot gather the courage to do so. He reminds her of her engagement to Phillotson and resigns himself to a life of renunciation. But when he returns to Melchester, he receives another note from her, begging him to continue being her friend. She also requests him to meet her when she comes to Melchester for her belongings the following Saturday.


prompt:
Chapter: Meanwhile a middle-aged man was dreaming a dream of great beauty
concerning the writer of the above letter.  He was Richard
Phillotson, who had recently removed from the mixed village school at
Lumsdon near Christminster, to undertake a large boys' school in his
native town of Shaston, which stood on a hill sixty miles to the
south-west as the crow flies.

A glance at the place and its accessories was almost enough to reveal
that the schoolmaster's plans and dreams so long indulged in had
been abandoned for some new dream with which neither the Church nor
literature had much in common.  Essentially an unpractical man, he
was now bent on making and saving money for a practical purpose--that
of keeping a wife, who, if she chose, might conduct one of the girls'
schools adjoining his own; for which purpose he had advised her to go
into training, since she would not marry him offhand.

About the time that Jude was removing from Marygreen to Melchester,
and entering on adventures at the latter place with Sue, the
schoolmaster was settling down in the new school-house at Shaston.
All the furniture being fixed, the books shelved, and the nails
driven, he had begun to sit in his parlour during the dark winter
nights and re-attempt some of his old studies--one branch of
which had included Roman-Britannic antiquities--an unremunerative
labour for a national school-master but a subject, that, after his
abandonment of the university scheme, had interested him as being a
comparatively unworked mine; practicable to those who, like himself,
had lived in lonely spots where these remains were abundant, and were
seen to compel inferences in startling contrast to accepted views on
the civilization of that time.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby
of Phillotson at present--his ostensible reason for going alone into
fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting
himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had
collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for
their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with
him.  But it was not the real, or the whole, reason, after all.
Thus on a particular evening in the month, when it had grown quite
late--to near midnight, indeed--and the light of his lamp, shining
from his window at a salient angle of the hill-top town over infinite
miles of valley westward, announced as by words a place and person
given over to study, he was not exactly studying.

The interior of the room--the books, the furniture, the
schoolmaster's loose coat, his attitude at the table, even the
flickering of the fire, bespoke the same dignified tale of
undistracted research--more than creditable to a man who had had no
advantages beyond those of his own making.  And yet the tale, true
enough till latterly, was not true now.  What he was regarding was
not history.  They were historic notes, written in a bold womanly
hand at his dictation some months before, and it was the clerical
rendering of word after word that absorbed him.

He presently took from a drawer a carefully tied bundle of letters,
few, very few, as correspondence counts nowadays.  Each was in its
envelope just as it had arrived, and the handwriting was of the same
womanly character as the historic notes.  He unfolded them one by
one and read them musingly. At first sight there seemed in these
small documents to be absolutely nothing to muse over.  They were
straightforward, frank letters, signed "Sue B--"; just such ones as
would be written during short absences, with no other thought than
their speedy destruction, and chiefly concerning books in reading
and other experiences of a training school, forgotten doubtless by
the writer with the passing of the day of their inditing.  In one of
them--quite a recent note--the young woman said that she had received
his considerate letter, and that it was honourable and generous of
him to say he would not come to see her oftener than she desired (the
school being such an awkward place for callers, and because of her
strong wish that her engagement to him should not be known, which it
would infallibly be if he visited her often). Over these phrases the
school-master pored.  What precise shade of satisfaction was to be
gathered from a woman's gratitude that the man who loved her had not
been often to see her?  The problem occupied him, distracted him.

He opened another drawer, and found therein an envelope, from which
he drew a photograph of Sue as a child, long before he had known her,
standing under trellis-work with a little basket in her hand.  There
was another of her as a young woman, her dark eyes and hair making a
very distinct and attractive picture of her, which just disclosed,
too, the thoughtfulness that lay behind her lighter moods.  It was
a duplicate of the one she had given Jude, and would have given to
any man.  Phillotson brought it half-way to his lips, but withdrew
it in doubt at her perplexing phrases: ultimately kissing the
dead pasteboard with all the passionateness, and more than all the
devotion, of a young man of eighteen.

The schoolmaster's was an unhealthy-looking, old-fashioned face,
rendered more old-fashioned by his style of shaving.  A certain
gentlemanliness had been imparted to it by nature, suggesting an
inherent wish to do rightly by all.  His speech was a little slow,
but his tones were sincere enough to make his hesitation no defect.
His greying hair was curly, and radiated from a point in the middle
of his crown.  There were four lines across his forehead, and he only
wore spectacles when reading at night.  It was almost certainly a
renunciation forced upon him by his academic purpose, rather than a
distaste for women, which had hitherto kept him from closing with one
of the sex in matrimony.

Such silent proceedings as those of this evening were repeated many
and oft times when he was not under the eye of the boys, whose quick
and penetrating regard would frequently become almost intolerable to
the self-conscious master in his present anxious care for Sue, making
him, in the grey hours of morning, dread to meet anew the gimlet
glances, lest they should read what the dream within him was.

He had honourably acquiesced in Sue's announced wish that he was
not often to visit her at the training school; but at length, his
patience being sorely tried, he set out one Saturday afternoon to pay
her an unexpected call.  There the news of her departure--expulsion
as it might almost have been considered--was flashed upon him without
warning or mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few
minutes to behold her face; and when he turned away he could hardly
see the road before him.

Sue had, in fact, never written a line to her suitor on the subject,
although it was fourteen days old.  A short reflection told him that
this proved nothing, a natural delicacy being as ample a reason for
silence as any degree of blameworthiness.

They had informed him at the school where she was living, and having
no immediate anxiety about her comfort, his thoughts took the
direction of a burning indignation against the training school
committee.  In his bewilderment Phillotson entered the adjacent
cathedral, just now in a direly dismantled state by reason of
the repairs.  He sat down on a block of freestone, regardless of
the dusty imprint it made on his breeches; and his listless eyes
following the movements of the workmen he presently became aware
that the reputed culprit, Sue's lover Jude, was one amongst them.

Jude had never spoken to his former hero since the meeting by the
model of Jerusalem.  Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson's
tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the
younger man's mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet
him, to communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson's
success in obtaining at least her promise had become known to Jude,
he had frankly recognized that he did not wish to see or hear of his
senior any more, learn anything of his pursuits, or even imagine
again what excellencies might appertain to his character.  On this
very day of the schoolmaster's visit Jude was expecting Sue, as she
had promised; and when therefore he saw the schoolmaster in the nave
of the building, saw, moreover, that he was coming to speak to him,
he felt no little embarrassment; which Phillotson's own embarrassment
prevented his observing.

Jude joined him, and they both withdrew from the other workmen to the
spot where Phillotson had been sitting.  Jude offered him a piece of
sackcloth for a cushion, and told him it was dangerous to sit on the
bare block.

"Yes; yes," said Phillotson abstractedly, as he reseated himself, his
eyes resting on the ground as if he were trying to remember where he
was.  "I won't keep you long.  It was merely that I have heard that
you have seen my little friend Sue recently.  It occurred to me to
speak to you on that account.  I merely want to ask--about her."

"I think I know what!"  Jude hurriedly said.  "About her escaping
from the training school, and her coming to me?"

"Yes."

"Well"--Jude for a moment felt an unprincipled and fiendish wish to
annihilate his rival at all cost.  By the exercise of that treachery
which love for the same woman renders possible to men the most
honourable in every other relation of life, he could send off
Phillotson in agony and defeat by saying that the scandal was true,
and that Sue had irretrievably committed herself with him.  But his
action did not respond for a moment to his animal instinct; and what
he said was, "I am glad of your kindness in coming to talk plainly to
me about it.  You know what they say?--that I ought to marry her."

"What!"

"And I wish with all my soul I could!"

Phillotson trembled, and his naturally pale face acquired a
corpselike sharpness in its lines.  "I had no idea that it was of
this nature!  God forbid!"

"No, no!" said Jude aghast.  "I thought you understood?  I mean that
were I in a position to marry her, or someone, and settle down,
instead of living in lodgings here and there, I should be glad!"

What he had really meant was simply that he loved her.

"But--since this painful matter has been opened up--what really
happened?" asked Phillotson, with the firmness of a man who felt that
a sharp smart now was better than a long agony of suspense hereafter.
"Cases arise, and this is one, when even ungenerous questions must be
put to make false assumptions impossible, and to kill scandal."

Jude explained readily; giving the whole series of adventures,
including the night at the shepherd's, her wet arrival at his
lodging, her indisposition from her immersion, their vigil of
discussion, and his seeing her off next morning.

"Well now," said Phillotson at the conclusion, "I take it as your
final word, and I know I can believe you, that the suspicion which
led to her rustication is an absolutely baseless one?"

"It is," said Jude solemnly.  "Absolutely.  So help me God!"

The schoolmaster rose.  Each of the twain felt that the interview
could not comfortably merge in a friendly discussion of their recent
experiences, after the manner of friends; and when Jude had taken him
round, and shown him some features of the renovation which the old
cathedral was undergoing, Phillotson bade the young man good-day and
went away.

This visit took place about eleven o'clock in the morning; but no Sue
appeared.  When Jude went to his dinner at one he saw his beloved
ahead of him in the street leading up from the North Gate, walking
as if no way looking for him.  Speedily overtaking her he remarked
that he had asked her to come to him at the cathedral, and she had
promised.

"I have been to get my things from the college," she said--an
observation which he was expected to take as an answer, though it was
not one.  Finding her to be in this evasive mood he felt inclined to
give her the information so long withheld.

"You have not seen Mr. Phillotson to-day?" he ventured to inquire.

"I have not.  But I am not going to be cross-examined about him; and
if you ask anything more I won't answer!"

"It is very odd that--" He stopped, regarding her.

"What?"

"That you are often not so nice in your real presence as you are in
your letters!"

"Does it really seem so to you?" said she, smiling with quick
curiosity.  "Well, that's strange; but I feel just the same about
you, Jude.  When you are gone away I seem such a coldhearted--"

As she knew his sentiment towards her Jude saw that they were getting
upon dangerous ground.  It was now, he thought, that he must speak as
an honest man.

But he did not speak, and she continued: "It was that which made me
write and say--I didn't mind your loving me--if you wanted to, much!"

The exultation he might have felt at what that implied, or seemed to
imply, was nullified by his intention, and he rested rigid till he
began: "I have never told you--"

"Yes you have," murmured she.

"I mean, I have never told you my history--all of it."

"But I guess it.  I know nearly."

Jude looked up.  Could she possibly know of that morning performance
of his with Arabella; which in a few months had ceased to be a
marriage more completely than by death?  He saw that she did not.

"I can't quite tell you here in the street," he went on with a gloomy
tongue.  "And you had better not come to my lodgings.  Let us go in
here."

The building by which they stood was the market-house; it was the
only place available; and they entered, the market being over, and
the stalls and areas empty.  He would have preferred a more congenial
spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn
aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a
floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual
squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse.  He
began and finished his brief narrative, which merely led up to the
information that he had married a wife some years earlier, and that
his wife was living still.  Almost before her countenance had time to
change she hurried out the words,

"Why didn't you tell me before!"

"I couldn't. It seemed so cruel to tell it."

"To yourself, Jude.  So it was better to be cruel to me!"

"No, dear darling!" cried Jude passionately.  He tried to take her
hand, but she withdrew it.  Their old relations of confidence seemed
suddenly to have ended, and the antagonisms of sex to sex were left
without any counter-poising predilections.  She was his comrade,
friend, unconscious sweetheart no longer; and her eyes regarded him
in estranged silence.

"I was ashamed of the episode in my life which brought about the
marriage," he continued.  "I can't explain it precisely now.  I could
have done it if you had taken it differently!"

"But how can I?" she burst out.  "Here I have been saying, or
writing, that--that you might love me, or something of the
sort!--just out of charity--and all the time--oh, it is perfectly
damnable how things are!" she said, stamping her foot in a nervous
quiver.

"You take me wrong, Sue!  I never thought you cared for me at all,
till quite lately; so I felt it did not matter!  Do you care for me,
Sue?--you know how I mean?--I don't like 'out of charity' at all!"

It was a question which in the circumstances Sue did not choose to
answer.

"I suppose she--your wife--is--a very pretty woman, even if she's
wicked?" she asked quickly.

"She's pretty enough, as far as that goes."

"Prettier than I am, no doubt!"

"You are not the least alike.  And I have never seen her for
years...  But she's sure to come back--they always do!"

"How strange of you to stay apart from her like this!" said Sue,
her trembling lip and lumpy throat belying her irony.  "You, such a
religious man.  How will the demi-gods in your Pantheon--I mean those
legendary persons you call saints--intercede for you after this?
Now if I had done such a thing it would have been different, and not
remarkable, for I at least don't regard marriage as a sacrament.
Your theories are not so advanced as your practice!"

"Sue, you are terribly cutting when you like to be--a perfect
Voltaire!  But you must treat me as you will!"

When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and trying to blink
away her sympathetic tears said with all the winning reproachfulness
of a heart-hurt woman: "Ah--you should have told me before you gave
me that idea that you wanted to be allowed to love me!  I had no
feeling before that moment at the railway-station, except--"  For
once Sue was as miserable as he, in her attempts to keep herself free
from emotion, and her less than half-success.

"Don't cry, dear!" he implored.

"I am--not crying--because I meant to--love you; but because of your
want of--confidence!"

They were quite screened from the market-square without, and he could
not help putting out his arm towards her waist.  His momentary desire
was the means of her rallying.  "No, no!" she said, drawing back
stringently, and wiping her eyes.  "Of course not!  It would be
hypocrisy to pretend that it would be meant as from my cousin; and it
can't be in any other way."

They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself recovered.  It
was distracting to Jude, and his heart would have ached less had she
appeared anyhow but as she did appear; essentially large-minded and
generous on reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow
womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give her sex.

"I don't blame you for what you couldn't help," she said, smiling.
"How should I be so foolish?  I do blame you a little bit for not
telling me before.  But, after all, it doesn't matter.  We should
have had to keep apart, you see, even if this had not been in your
life."

"No, we shouldn't, Sue!  This is the only obstacle."

"You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be your
wife, even if there had been no obstacle," said Sue, with a gentle
seriousness which did not reveal her mind.  "And then we are cousins,
and it is bad for cousins to marry.  And--I am engaged to somebody
else.  As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of
friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to
continue.  Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited,
as is proved by their expelling me from the school.  Their philosophy
only recognizes relations based on animal desire.  The wide field
of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary
part, is ignored by them--the part of--who is it?--Venus Urania."

Her being able to talk learnedly showed that she was mistress of
herself again; and before they parted she had almost regained her
vivacious glance, her reciprocity of tone, her gay manner, and her
second-thought attitude of critical largeness towards others of her
age and sex.

He could speak more freely now.  "There were several reasons against
my telling you rashly.  One was what I have said; another, that
it was always impressed upon me that I ought not to marry--that
I belonged to an odd and peculiar family--the wrong breed for
marriage."

"Ah--who used to say that to you?"

"My great-aunt. She said it always ended badly with us Fawleys."

"That's strange.  My father used to say the same to me!"

They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an
assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would
have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness--two bitters in
one dish.

"Oh, but there can't be anything in it!" she said with nervous
lightness.  "Our family have been unlucky of late years in choosing
mates--that's all."

And then they pretended to persuade themselves that all that had
happened was of no consequence, and that they could still be cousins
and friends and warm correspondents, and have happy genial times
when they met, even if they met less frequently than before.  Their
parting was in good friendship, and yet Jude's last look into her
eyes was tinged with inquiry, for he felt that he did not even now
quite know her mind.

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

completion: The chapter begins with Phillotson, who is now the master of a large boys' school in Shaston. Apart from his work at school, he is also interested in Roman-Brittanic antiquities. He is madly in love with Sue and keeps thinking of her and going over the few letters she has written. He decides to pay an unannounced visit to the training college and is shocked to hear of her expulsion two weeks earlier. He is also told the cause: her apparent licentious behavior with a young man. Sue had not said a word about this matter. He enters the nearby Cathedral in a daze. He finds Jude at work there. Jude explains to him the details behind the episode and confirms Sue's innocence. He also reveals his own feelings for Sue. Phillotson leaves to return to Shaston. Later the same day, Sue arrives in Melchester to collect her things from the training college, and Jude meets her and takes her to a deserted place. Here he finally speaks of his disastrous marriage to Arabella, and Sue is horrified. She demands to know how he can reconcile his broken marriage with the religious beliefs he upholds so dedicatedly. Reminded of the misfortune that the members of their family have faced in marriage, they finally agree to part as friends.


prompt:
Chapter: Tidings from Sue a day or two after passed across Jude like a
withering blast.

Before reading the letter he was led to suspect that its contents
were of a somewhat serious kind by catching sight of the
signature--which was in her full name, never used in her
correspondence with him since her first note:

   MY DEAR JUDE,--I have something to tell you which perhaps
   you will not be surprised to hear, though certainly it may
   strike you as being accelerated (as the railway companies
   say of their trains). Mr. Phillotson and I are to be married
   quite soon--in three or four weeks.  We had intended, as you
   know, to wait till I had gone through my course of training
   and obtained my certificate, so as to assist him, if
   necessary, in the teaching.  But he generously says he does
   not see any object in waiting, now I am not at the training
   school.  It is so good of him, because the awkwardness of my
   situation has really come about by my fault in getting
   expelled.

   Wish me joy.  Remember I say you are to, and you mustn't
   refuse!--Your affectionate cousin,

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude staggered under the news; could eat no breakfast; and kept on
drinking tea because his mouth was so dry.  Then presently he went
back to his work and laughed the usual bitter laugh of a man so
confronted.  Everything seemed turning to satire.  And yet, what
could the poor girl do? he asked himself, and felt worse than
shedding tears.

"O Susanna Florence Mary!" he said as he worked.  "You don't know
what marriage means!"

Could it be possible that his announcement of his own marriage had
pricked her on to this, just as his visit to her when in liquor may
have pricked her on to her engagement?  To be sure, there seemed to
exist these other and sufficient reasons, practical and social, for
her decision; but Sue was not a very practical or calculating person;
and he was compelled to think that a pique at having his secret
sprung upon her had moved her to give way to Phillotson's probable
representations, that the best course to prove how unfounded were the
suspicions of the school authorities would be to marry him off-hand,
as in fulfilment of an ordinary engagement.  Sue had, in fact, been
placed in an awkward corner.  Poor Sue!

He determined to play the Spartan; to make the best of it, and
support her; but he could not write the requested good wishes for a
day or two.  Meanwhile there came another note from his impatient
little dear:

   Jude, will you give me away?  I have nobody else who could
   do it so conveniently as you, being the only married relation
   I have here on the spot, even if my father were friendly
   enough to be willing, which he isn't.  I hope you won't think
   it a trouble?  I have been looking at the marriage service in
   the prayer-book, and it seems to me very humiliating that a
   giver-away should be required at all.  According to the
   ceremony as there printed, my bridegroom chooses me of his
   own will and pleasure; but I don't choose him.  Somebody
   GIVES me to him, like a she-ass or she-goat, or any other
   domestic animal.  Bless your exalted views of woman, O
   churchman!  But I forget: I am no longer privileged to tease
   you.--Ever,

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:

   MY DEAR SUE,--Of course I wish you joy!  And also of course
   I will give you away.  What I suggest is that, as you have
   no house of your own, you do not marry from your school
   friend's, but from mine.  It would be more proper, I think,
   since I am, as you say, the person nearest related to you in
   this part of the world.

   I don't see why you sign your letter in such a new and
   terribly formal way?  Surely you care a bit about me
   still!--Ever your affectionate,

   JUDE.

What had jarred on him even more than the signature was a little
sting he had been silent on--the phrase "married relation"--What an
idiot it made him seem as her lover!  If Sue had written that in
satire, he could hardly forgive her; if in suffering--ah, that was
another thing!

His offer of his lodging must have commended itself to Phillotson
at any rate, for the schoolmaster sent him a line of warm thanks,
accepting the convenience.  Sue also thanked him.  Jude immediately
moved into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage
of the suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue's unpleasant
experience as for the sake of room.

Then Sue wrote to tell him the day fixed for the wedding; and Jude
decided, after inquiry, that she should come into residence on the
following Saturday, which would allow of a ten days' stay in the city
prior to the ceremony, sufficiently representing a nominal residence
of fifteen.

She arrived by the ten o'clock train on the day aforesaid, Jude not
going to meet her at the station, by her special request, that he
should not lose a morning's work and pay, she said (if this were
her true reason).  But so well by this time did he know Sue that the
remembrance of their mutual sensitiveness at emotional crises might,
he thought, have weighed with her in this.  When he came home to
dinner she had taken possession of her apartment.

She lived in the same house with him, but on a different floor, and
they saw each other little, an occasional supper being the only meal
they took together, when Sue's manner was something like that of a
scared child.  What she felt he did not know; their conversation was
mechanical, though she did not look pale or ill.  Phillotson came
frequently, but mostly when Jude was absent.  On the morning of the
wedding, when Jude had given himself a holiday, Sue and her cousin
had breakfast together for the first and last time during this
curious interval; in his room--the parlour--which he had hired for
the period of Sue's residence.  Seeing, as women do, how helpless he
was in making the place comfortable, she bustled about.

"What's the matter, Jude?" she said suddenly.

He was leaning with his elbows on the table and his chin on his
hands, looking into a futurity which seemed to be sketched out on the
tablecloth.

"Oh--nothing!"

"You are 'father', you know.  That's what they call the man who gives
you away."

Jude could have said "Phillotson's age entitles him to be called
that!"  But he would not annoy her by such a cheap retort.

She talked incessantly, as if she dreaded his indulgence in
reflection, and before the meal was over both he and she wished they
had not put such confidence in their new view of things, and had
taken breakfast apart.  What oppressed Jude was the thought that,
having done a wrong thing of this sort himself, he was aiding and
abetting the woman he loved in doing a like wrong thing, instead of
imploring and warning her against it.  It was on his tongue to say,
"You have quite made up your mind?"

After breakfast they went out on an errand together moved by a mutual
thought that it was the last opportunity they would have of indulging
in unceremonious companionship.  By the irony of fate, and the
curious trick in Sue's nature of tempting Providence at critical
times, she took his arm as they walked through the muddy street--a
thing she had never done before in her life--and on turning the
corner they found themselves close to a grey perpendicular church
with a low-pitched roof--the church of St. Thomas.

"That's the church," said Jude.

"Where I am going to be married?"

"Yes."

"Indeed!" she exclaimed with curiosity.  "How I should like to go in
and see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it."

Again he said to himself, "She does not realize what marriage means!"

He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by
the western door.  The only person inside the gloomy building was
a charwoman cleaning.  Sue still held Jude's arm, almost as if she
loved him.  Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning;
but his thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by an
ache:

                          ... I can find no way
   How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,
   Nor prove too much for your womanhood!

They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar
railing, which they stood against in silence, turning then and
walking down the nave again, her hand still on his arm, precisely
like a couple just married.  The too suggestive incident, entirely
of her making, nearly broke down Jude.

"I like to do things like this," she said in the delicate voice of an
epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.

"I know you do!" said Jude.

"They are interesting, because they have probably never been done
before.  I shall walk down the church like this with my husband in
about two hours, shan't I!"

"No doubt you will!"

"Was it like this when you were married?"

"Good God, Sue--don't be so awfully merciless! ...  There, dear one,
I didn't mean it!"

"Ah--you are vexed!" she said regretfully, as she blinked away an
access of eye moisture.  "And I promised never to vex you! ...  I
suppose I ought not to have asked you to bring me in here.  Oh, I
oughtn't!  I see it now.  My curiosity to hunt up a new sensation
always leads me into these scrapes.  Forgive me! ...  You will, won't
you, Jude?"

The appeal was so remorseful that Jude's eyes were even wetter than
hers as he pressed her hand for Yes.

"Now we'll hurry away, and I won't do it any more!" she continued
humbly; and they came out of the building, Sue intending to go
on to the station to meet Phillotson.  But the first person they
encountered on entering the main street was the schoolmaster himself,
whose train had arrived sooner than Sue expected.  There was nothing
really to demur to in her leaning on Jude's arm; but she withdrew her
hand, and Jude thought that Phillotson had looked surprised.

"We have been doing such a funny thing!" said she, smiling candidly.
"We've been to the church, rehearsing as it were.  Haven't we, Jude?"

"How?" said Phillotson curiously.

Jude inwardly deplored what he thought to be unnecessary frankness;
but she had gone too far not to explain all, which she accordingly
did, telling him how they had marched up to the altar.

Seeing how puzzled Phillotson seemed, Jude said as cheerfully as he
could, "I am going to buy her another little present.  Will you both
come to the shop with me?"

"No," said Sue, "I'll go on to the house with him"; and requesting
her lover not to be a long time she departed with the schoolmaster.

Jude soon joined them at his rooms, and shortly after they prepared
for the ceremony.  Phillotson's hair was brushed to a painful
extent, and his shirt collar appeared stiffer than it had been for
the previous twenty years.  Beyond this he looked dignified and
thoughtful, and altogether a man of whom it was not unsafe to predict
that he would make a kind and considerate husband.  That he adored
Sue was obvious; and she could almost be seen to feel that she was
undeserving his adoration.

Although the distance was so short he had hired a fly from the Red
Lion, and six or seven women and children had gathered by the door
when they came out.  The schoolmaster and Sue were unknown, though
Jude was getting to be recognized as a citizen; and the couple were
judged to be some relations of his from a distance, nobody supposing
Sue to have been a recent pupil at the training school.

In the carriage Jude took from his pocket his extra little
wedding-present, which turned out to be two or three yards of white
tulle, which he threw over her bonnet and all, as a veil.

"It looks so odd over a bonnet," she said.  "I'll take the bonnet
off."

"Oh no--let it stay," said Phillotson.  And she obeyed.

When they had passed up the church and were standing in their places
Jude found that the antecedent visit had certainly taken off the edge
of this performance, but by the time they were half-way on with the
service he wished from his heart that he had not undertaken the
business of giving her away.  How could Sue have had the temerity to
ask him to do it--a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him?
Women were different from men in such matters.  Was it that they
were, instead of more sensitive, as reputed, more callous, and less
romantic; or were they more heroic?  Or was Sue simply so perverse
that she wilfully gave herself and him pain for the odd and mournful
luxury of practising long-suffering in her own person, and of being
touched with tender pity for him at having made him practise it?  He
could perceive that her face was nervously set, and when they reached
the trying ordeal of Jude giving her to Phillotson she could hardly
command herself; rather, however, as it seemed, from her knowledge of
what her cousin must feel, whom she need not have had there at all,
than from self-consideration.  Possibly she would go on inflicting
such pains again and again, and grieving for the sufferer again and
again, in all her colossal inconsistency.

Phillotson seemed not to notice, to be surrounded by a mist which
prevented his seeing the emotions of others.  As soon as they had
signed their names and come away, and the suspense was over, Jude
felt relieved.

The meal at his lodging was a very simple affair, and at two o'clock
they went off.  In crossing the pavement to the fly she looked back;
and there was a frightened light in her eyes.  Could it be that Sue
had acted with such unusual foolishness as to plunge into she knew
not what for the sake of asserting her independence of him, of
retaliating on him for his secrecy?  Perhaps Sue was thus venturesome
with men because she was childishly ignorant of that side of their
natures which wore out women's hearts and lives.

When her foot was on the carriage-step she turned round, saying that
she had forgotten something.  Jude and the landlady offered to get
it.

"No," she said, running back.  "It is my handkerchief.  I know where
I left it."

Jude followed her back.  She had found it, and came holding it in her
hand.  She looked into his eyes with her own tearful ones, and her
lips suddenly parted as if she were going to avow something.  But she
went on; and whatever she had meant to say remained unspoken.

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

completion: A day or two later Jude gets a letter formally signed by Sue, informing him of her plan to marry Phillotson in a few weeks. Jude is stunned by the news and suspects that his own revelation of his marriage may have triggered this rash decision. Before he can collect his wits, she writes a second letter requesting him to give her away at the wedding. She adds a few sarcastic comments on the custom of giving away the bride. Jude agrees and offers to put her up at his lodgings for the required ten days. Sue lives in the same house with him, on a different floor, sharing an occasional meal. Her manner is strained and nervous. Jude is convinced she is marrying Phillotson on the rebound, but although he would like to warn her against the marriage, he is helpless. On the morning of the wedding day, Sue insists on entering the church of St. Thomas with Jude for a kind of rehearsal. She wants to see the aisle where she will walk down with her husband. This and the actual wedding are extremely painful for Jude. After the wedding Sue and Phillotson have a meal at Jude's lodgings and then the newly wedded couple leaves. Sue appears to want to convey something to Jude, but she does not speak and hurries away.


prompt:
Chapter: Jude wondered if she had really left her handkerchief behind; or
whether it were that she had miserably wished to tell him of a love
that at the last moment she could not bring herself to express.

He could not stay in his silent lodging when they were gone, and
fearing that he might be tempted to drown his misery in alcohol he
went upstairs, changed his dark clothes for his white, his thin boots
for his thick, and proceeded to his customary work for the afternoon.

But in the cathedral he seemed to hear a voice behind him, and to
be possessed with an idea that she would come back.  She could not
possibly go home with Phillotson, he fancied.  The feeling grew and
stirred.  The moment that the clock struck the last of his working
hours he threw down his tools and rushed homeward.  "Has anybody been
for me?" he asked.

Nobody had been there.

As he could claim the downstairs sitting-room till twelve o'clock
that night he sat in it all the evening; and even when the clock had
struck eleven, and the family had retired, he could not shake off
the feeling that she would come back and sleep in the little room
adjoining his own in which she had slept so many previous days.  Her
actions were always unpredictable: why should she not come?  Gladly
would he have compounded for the denial of her as a sweetheart and
wife by having her live thus as a fellow-lodger and friend, even on
the most distant terms.  His supper still remained spread, and going
to the front door, and softly setting it open, he returned to the
room and sat as watchers sit on Old-Midsummer eves, expecting the
phantom of the Beloved.  But she did not come.

Having indulged in this wild hope he went upstairs, and looked out of
the window, and pictured her through the evening journey to London,
whither she and Phillotson had gone for their holiday; their rattling
along through the damp night to their hotel, under the same sky of
ribbed cloud as that he beheld, through which the moon showed its
position rather than its shape, and one or two of the larger stars
made themselves visible as faint nebulae only.  It was a new
beginning of Sue's history.  He projected his mind into the future,
and saw her with children more or less in her own likeness around
her.  But the consolation of regarding them as a continuation of
her identity was denied to him, as to all such dreamers, by the
wilfulness of Nature in not allowing issue from one parent alone.
Every desired renewal of an existence is debased by being half alloy.
"If at the estrangement or death of my lost love, I could go and see
her child--hers solely--there would be comfort in it!" said Jude.
And then he again uneasily saw, as he had latterly seen with more and
more frequency, the scorn of Nature for man's finer emotions, and her
lack of interest in his aspirations.

The oppressive strength of his affection for Sue showed itself on
the morrow and following days yet more clearly.  He could no longer
endure the light of the Melchester lamps; the sunshine was as drab
paint, and the blue sky as zinc.  Then he received news that his old
aunt was dangerously ill at Marygreen, which intelligence almost
coincided with a letter from his former employer at Christminster,
who offered him permanent work of a good class if he would come back.
The letters were almost a relief to him.  He started to visit Aunt
Drusilla, and resolved to go onward to Christminster to see what
worth there might be in the builder's offer.

Jude found his aunt even worse than the communication from the Widow
Edlin had led him to expect.  There was every possibility of her
lingering on for weeks or months, though little likelihood.  He wrote
to Sue informing her of the state of her aunt, and suggesting that
she might like to see her aged relative alive.  He would meet her at
Alfredston Road, the following evening, Monday, on his way back from
Christminster, if she could come by the up-train which crossed his
down-train at that station.  Next morning, according, he went on to
Christminster, intending to return to Alfredston soon enough to keep
the suggested appointment with Sue.

The city of learning wore an estranged look, and he had lost all
feeling for its associations.  Yet as the sun made vivid lights
and shades of the mullioned architecture of the facades, and drew
patterns of the crinkled battlements on the young turf of the
quadrangles, Jude thought he had never seen the place look more
beautiful.  He came to the street in which he had first beheld Sue.
The chair she had occupied when, leaning over her ecclesiastical
scrolls, a hog-hair brush in her hand, her girlish figure had
arrested the gaze of his inquiring eyes, stood precisely in its
former spot, empty.  It was as if she were dead, and nobody had been
found capable of succeeding her in that artistic pursuit.  Hers was
now the city phantom, while those of the intellectual and devotional
worthies who had once moved him to emotion were no longer able to
assert their presence there.

However, here he was; and in fulfilment of his intention he went on
to his former lodging in "Beersheba," near the ritualistic church of
St. Silas.  The old landlady who opened the door seemed glad to see
him again, and bringing some lunch informed him that the builder who
had employed him had called to inquire his address.

Jude went on to the stone-yard where he had worked.  But the old
sheds and bankers were distasteful to him; he felt it impossible to
engage himself to return and stay in this place of vanished dreams.
He longed for the hour of the homeward train to Alfredston, where he
might probably meet Sue.

Then, for one ghastly half-hour of depression caused by these scenes,
there returned upon him that feeling which had been his undoing more
than once--that he was not worth the trouble of being taken care of
either by himself or others; and during this half-hour he met Tinker
Taylor, the bankrupt ecclesiastical ironmonger, at Fourways, who
proposed that they should adjourn to a bar and drink together.
They walked along the street till they stood before one of the
great palpitating centres of Christminster life, the inn wherein he
formerly had responded to the challenge to rehearse the Creed in
Latin--now a popular tavern with a spacious and inviting entrance,
which gave admittance to a bar that had been entirely renovated and
refitted in modern style since Jude's residence here.

Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too
stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker
than he had money to be just then.  Jude was longer finishing his,
and stood abstractedly silent in the, for the minute, almost empty
place.  The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout,
mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted
ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed
sofa-benches.  The room was divided into compartments in the approved
manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany
framing, to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush
by the recognitions of those in the next.  On the inside of the
counter two barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines,
and the row of little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter
trough.

Feeling tired, and having nothing more to do till the train left,
Jude sat down on one of the sofas.  At the back of the barmaids rose
bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front,
on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name
of, in bottles of topaz, sapphire, ruby and amethyst.  The moment
was enlivened by the entrance of some customers into the next
compartment, and the starting of the mechanical tell-tale of monies
received, which emitted a ting-ting every time a coin was put in.

The barmaid attending to this compartment was invisible to Jude's
direct glance, though a reflection of her back in the glass behind
her was occasionally caught by his eyes.  He had only observed this
listlessly, when she turned her face for a moment to the glass to set
her hair tidy.  Then he was amazed to discover that the face was
Arabella's.

If she had come on to his compartment she would have seen him.
But she did not, this being presided over by the maiden on the other
side.  Abby was in a black gown, with white linen cuffs and a broad
white collar, and her figure, more developed than formerly, was
accentuated by a bunch of daffodils that she wore on her left bosom.
In the compartment she served stood an electro-plated fountain of
water over a spirit-lamp, whose blue flame sent a steam from the top,
all this being visible to him only in the mirror behind her; which
also reflected the faces of the men she was attending to--one of them
a handsome, dissipated young fellow, possibly an undergraduate, who
had been relating to her an experience of some humorous sort.

"Oh, Mr. Cockman, now!  How can you tell such a tale to me in my
innocence!" she cried gaily.  "Mr. Cockman, what do you use to make
your moustache curl so beautiful?"  As the young man was clean shaven,
the retort provoked a laugh at his expense.

"Come!" said he, "I'll have a curacao; and a light, please."

She served the liqueur from one of the lovely bottles and striking
a match held it to his cigarette with ministering archness while he
whiffed.

"Well, have you heard from your husband lately, my dear?" he asked.

"Not a sound," said she.

"Where is he?"

"I left him in Australia; and I suppose he's there still."

Jude's eyes grew rounder.

"What made you part from him?"

"Don't you ask questions, and you won't hear lies."

"Come then, give me my change, which you've been keeping from me for
the last quarter of an hour; and I'll romantically vanish up the
street of this picturesque city."

She handed the change over the counter, in taking which he caught her
fingers and held them.  There was a slight struggle and titter, and
he bade her good-bye and left.

Jude had looked on with the eye of a dazed philosopher.  It was
extraordinary how far removed from his life Arabella now seemed to
be.  He could not realize their nominal closeness.  And, this being
the case, in his present frame of mind he was indifferent to the fact
that Arabella was his wife indeed.

The compartment that she served emptied itself of visitors, and
after a brief thought he entered it, and went forward to the counter.
Arabella did not recognize him for a moment.  Then their glances met.
She started; till a humorous impudence sparkled in her eyes, and she
spoke.

"Well, I'm blest!  I thought you were underground years ago!"

"Oh!"

"I never heard anything of you, or I don't know that I should
have come here.  But never mind!  What shall I treat you to this
afternoon?  A Scotch and soda?  Come, anything that the house will
afford, for old acquaintance' sake!"

"Thanks, Arabella," said Jude without a smile.  "But I don't want
anything more than I've had."  The fact was that her unexpected
presence there had destroyed at a stroke his momentary taste for
strong liquor as completely as if it had whisked him back to his
milk-fed infancy.

"That's a pity, now you could get it for nothing."

"How long have you been here?"

"About six weeks.  I returned from Sydney three months ago.  I always
liked this business, you know."

"I wonder you came to this place!"

"Well, as I say, I thought you were gone to glory, and being in
London I saw the situation in an advertisement.  Nobody was likely to
know me here, even if I had minded, for I was never in Christminster
in my growing up."

"Why did you return from Australia?"

"Oh, I had my reasons...  Then you are not a don yet?"

"No."

"Not even a reverend?"

"No."

"Nor so much as a rather reverend dissenting gentleman?"

"I am as I was."

"True--you look so."  She idly allowed her fingers to rest on the
pull of the beer-engine as she inspected him critically.  He observed
that her hands were smaller and whiter than when he had lived with
her, and that on the hand which pulled the engine she wore an
ornamental ring set with what seemed to be real sapphires--which they
were, indeed, and were much admired as such by the young men who
frequented the bar.

"So you pass as having a living husband," he continued.

"Yes.  I thought it might be awkward if I called myself a widow, as I
should have liked."

"True.  I am known here a little."

"I didn't mean on that account--for as I said I didn't expect you.
It was for other reasons."

"What were they?"

"I don't care to go into them," she replied evasively.  "I make a
very good living, and I don't know that I want your company."

Here a chappie with no chin, and a moustache like a lady's eyebrow,
came and asked for a curiously compounded drink, and Arabella was
obliged to go and attend to him.  "We can't talk here," she said,
stepping back a moment.  "Can't you wait till nine?  Say yes, and
don't be a fool.  I can get off duty two hours sooner than usual, if
I ask.  I am not living in the house at present."

He reflected and said gloomily, "I'll come back.  I suppose we'd
better arrange something."

"Oh, bother arranging!  I'm not going to arrange anything!"

"But I must know a thing or two; and, as you say, we can't talk here.
Very well; I'll call for you."

Depositing his unemptied glass he went out and walked up and down the
street.  Here was a rude flounce into the pellucid sentimentality of
his sad attachment to Sue.  Though Arabella's word was absolutely
untrustworthy, he thought there might be some truth in her
implication that she had not wished to disturb him, and had really
supposed him dead.  However, there was only one thing now to be done,
and that was to play a straightforward part, the law being the law,
and the woman between whom and himself there was no more unity than
between east and west, being in the eye of the Church one person with
him.

Having to meet Arabella here, it was impossible to meet Sue at
Alfredston as he had promised.  At every thought of this a pang
had gone through him; but the conjuncture could not be helped.
Arabella was perhaps an intended intervention to punish him for his
unauthorized love.  Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory
waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every
cloister and hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he
repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were
resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence
which seemed to him gratuitous irony.  The inn was now brilliantly
lighted up, and the scene was altogether more brisk and gay.  The
faces of the barmaidens had risen in colour, each having a pink
flush on her cheek; their manners were still more vivacious than
before--more abandoned, more excited, more sensuous, and they
expressed their sentiments and desires less euphemistically, laughing
in a lackadaisical tone, without reserve.

The bar had been crowded with men of all sorts during the previous
hour, and he had heard from without the hubbub of their voices; but
the customers were fewer at last.  He nodded to Arabella, and told
her that she would find him outside the door when she came away.

"But you must have something with me first," she said with great
good humour.  "Just an early night-cap: I always do.  Then you can
go out and wait a minute, as it is best we should not be seen going
together."  She drew a couple of liqueur glasses of brandy; and
though she had evidently, from her countenance, already taken in
enough alcohol either by drinking or, more probably, from the
atmosphere she had breathed for so many hours, she finished hers
quickly.  He also drank his, and went outside the house.

In a few minutes she came, in a thick jacket and a hat with a black
feather.  "I live quite near," she said, taking his arm, "and can let
myself in by a latch-key at any time.  What arrangement do you want
to come to?"

"Oh--none in particular," he answered, thoroughly sick and tired, his
thoughts again reverting to Alfredston, and the train he did not go
by; the probable disappointment of Sue that he was not there when
she arrived, and the missed pleasure of her company on the long and
lonely climb by starlight up the hills to Marygreen.  "I ought to
have gone back really!  My aunt is on her deathbed, I fear."

"I'll go over with you to-morrow morning.  I think I could get a day
off."

There was something particularly uncongenial in the idea of Arabella,
who had no more sympathy than a tigress with his relations or him,
coming to the bedside of his dying aunt, and meeting Sue.  Yet he
said, "Of course, if you'd like to, you can."

"Well, that we'll consider...  Now, until we have come to some
agreement it is awkward our being together here--where you are known,
and I am getting known, though without any suspicion that I have
anything to do with you.  As we are going towards the station,
suppose we take the nine-forty train to Aldbrickham?  We shall be
there in little more than half an hour, and nobody will know us for
one night, and we shall be quite free to act as we choose till we
have made up our minds whether we'll make anything public or not."

"As you like."

"Then wait till I get two or three things.  This is my lodging.
Sometimes when late I sleep at the hotel where I am engaged, so
nobody will think anything of my staying out."

She speedily returned, and they went on to the railway, and made the
half-hour's journey to Aldbrickham, where they entered a third-rate
inn near the station in time for a late supper.

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

completion: After the wedding, Jude finds life in Melchester terribly depressing without Sue. He unrealistically hopes Sue will come back to him some days later. Hearing Aunt Drusilla is sick, he goes to Marygreen to visit her. At the same time, his old employer offers him work at Christminster. Aunt Drusilla is worse than Jude expected, and so he writes to Sue, suggesting she come and see her aunt. He offers to meet her at Alfredston Road on his way back from Christminster. At Christminster he is haunted by painful memories and decides not to stay there. He steps into a pub with his friend Tinker Taylor. At the bar, he is startled to see Arabella working as a barmaid. He goes up to her, and she explains that she returned from Australia three months ago. He arranges to meet Arabella later that evening in order to decide what to do. Therefore he has to miss his meeting with Sue.