prompt:
Chapter: Their next and second attempt thereat was more deliberately made,
though it was begun on the morning following the singular child's
arrival at their home.

Him they found to be in the habit of sitting silent, his quaint and
weird face set, and his eyes resting on things they did not see in
the substantial world.

"His face is like the tragic mask of Melpomene," said Sue.  "What is
your name, dear?  Did you tell us?"

"Little Father Time is what they always called me.  It is a nickname;
because I look so aged, they say."

"And you talk so, too," said Sue tenderly.  "It is strange, Jude,
that these preternaturally old boys almost always come from new
countries.  But what were you christened?"

"I never was."

"Why was that?"

"Because, if I died in damnation, 'twould save the expense of a
Christian funeral."

"Oh--your name is not Jude, then?" said his father with some
disappointment.

The boy shook his head.  "Never heerd on it."

"Of course not," said Sue quickly; "since she was hating you all the
time!"

"We'll have him christened," said Jude; and privately to Sue: "The
day we are married."  Yet the advent of the child disturbed him.

Their position lent them shyness, and having an impression that a
marriage at a superintendent registrar's office was more private than
an ecclesiastical one, they decided to avoid a church this time.
Both Sue and Jude together went to the office of the district to give
notice: they had become such companions that they could hardly do
anything of importance except in each other's company.

Jude Fawley signed the form of notice, Sue looking over his shoulder
and watching his hand as it traced the words.  As she read the
four-square undertaking, never before seen by her, into which
her own and Jude's names were inserted, and by which that very
volatile essence, their love for each other, was supposed to be
made permanent, her face seemed to grow painfully apprehensive.
"Names and Surnames of the Parties"--(they were to be parties now,
not lovers, she thought). "Condition"--(a horrid idea)--"Rank or
Occupation"--"Age"--"Dwelling at"--"Length of Residence"--"Church or
Building in which the Marriage is to be solemnized"--"District and
County in which the Parties respectively dwell."

"It spoils the sentiment, doesn't it!" she said on their way home.
"It seems making a more sordid business of it even than signing the
contract in a vestry.  There is a little poetry in a church.  But
we'll try to get through with it, dearest, now."

"We will.  'For what man is he that hath betrothed a wife and hath
not taken her?  Let him go and return unto his house, lest he
die in the battle, and another man take her.'  So said the Jewish
law-giver."

"How you know the Scriptures, Jude!  You really ought to have been a
parson.  I can only quote profane writers!"

During the interval before the issuing of the certificate, Sue, in her
housekeeping errands, sometimes walked past the office, and furtively
glancing in saw affixed to the wall the notice of the purposed clinch
to their union.  She could not bear its aspect.  Coming after her
previous experience of matrimony, all the romance of their attachment
seemed to be starved away by placing her present case in the same
category.  She was usually leading little Father Time by the hand,
and fancied that people thought him hers, and regarded the intended
ceremony as the patching up of an old error.

Meanwhile Jude decided to link his present with his past in some
slight degree by inviting to the wedding the only person remaining on
earth who was associated with his early life at Marygreen--the aged
widow Mrs. Edlin, who had been his great-aunt's friend and nurse in
her last illness.  He hardly expected that she would come; but she
did, bringing singular presents, in the form of apples, jam, brass
snuffers, an ancient pewter dish, a warming-pan, and an enormous bag
of goose feathers towards a bed.  She was allotted the spare room in
Jude's house, whither she retired early, and where they could hear
her through the ceiling below, honestly saying the Lord's Prayer in
a loud voice, as the Rubric directed.

As, however, she could not sleep, and discovered that Sue and Jude
were still sitting up--it being in fact only ten o'clock--she dressed
herself again and came down, and they all sat by the fire till a late
hour--Father Time included; though, as he never spoke, they were
hardly conscious of him.

"Well, I bain't set against marrying as your great-aunt was," said
the widow.  "And I hope 'twill be a jocund wedding for ye in all
respects this time.  Nobody can hope it more, knowing what I do
of your families, which is more, I suppose, than anybody else now
living.  For they have been unlucky that way, God knows."

Sue breathed uneasily.

"They was always good-hearted people, too--wouldn't kill a fly if
they knowed it," continued the wedding guest.  "But things happened
to thwart 'em, and if everything wasn't vitty they were upset.  No
doubt that's how he that the tale is told of came to do what 'a
did--if he WERE one of your family."

"What was that?" said Jude.

"Well--that tale, ye know; he that was gibbeted just on the brow of
the hill by the Brown House--not far from the milestone between
Marygreen and Alfredston, where the other road branches off.  But
Lord, 'twas in my grandfather's time; and it medn' have been one of
your folk at all."

"I know where the gibbet is said to have stood, very well," murmured
Jude.  "But I never heard of this.  What--did this man--my ancestor
and Sue's--kill his wife?"

"'Twer not that exactly.  She ran away from him, with their child,
to her friends; and while she was there the child died.  He wanted
the body, to bury it where his people lay, but she wouldn't give it
up.  Her husband then came in the night with a cart, and broke into
the house to steal the coffin away; but he was catched, and being
obstinate, wouldn't tell what he broke in for.  They brought it in
burglary, and that's why he was hanged and gibbeted on Brown House
Hill.  His wife went mad after he was dead.  But it medn't be true
that he belonged to ye more than to me."

A small slow voice rose from the shade of the fireside, as if out of
the earth: "If I was you, Mother, I wouldn't marry Father!"  It came
from little Time, and they started, for they had forgotten him.

"Oh, it is only a tale," said Sue cheeringly.

After this exhilarating tradition from the widow on the eve of
the solemnization they rose, and, wishing their guest good-night,
retired.

The next morning Sue, whose nervousness intensified with the
hours, took Jude privately into the sitting-room before starting.
"Jude, I want you to kiss me, as a lover, incorporeally," she said,
tremulously nestling up to him, with damp lashes.  "It won't be ever
like this any more, will it?  I wish we hadn't begun the business.
But I suppose we must go on.  How horrid that story was last night!
It spoilt my thoughts of to-day. It makes me feel as if a tragic doom
overhung our family, as it did the house of Atreus."

"Or the house of Jeroboam," said the quondam theologian.

"Yes.  And it seems awful temerity in us two to go marrying!  I am
going to vow to you in the same words I vowed in to my other husband,
and you to me in the same as you used to your other wife; regardless
of the deterrent lesson we were taught by those experiments!"

"If you are uneasy I am made unhappy," said he.  "I had hoped you
would feel quite joyful.  But if you don't, you don't. It is no use
pretending.  It is a dismal business to you, and that makes it so to
me!"

"It is unpleasantly like that other morning--that's all," she
murmured.  "Let us go on now."

They started arm in arm for the office aforesaid, no witness
accompanying them except the Widow Edlin.  The day was chilly and
dull, and a clammy fog blew through the town from "Royal-tower'd
Thame."  On the steps of the office there were the muddy foot-marks
of people who had entered, and in the entry were damp umbrellas.
Within the office several persons were gathered, and our couple
perceived that a marriage between a soldier and a young woman was
just in progress.  Sue, Jude, and the widow stood in the background
while this was going on, Sue reading the notices of marriage on the
wall.  The room was a dreary place to two of their temperament,
though to its usual frequenters it doubtless seemed ordinary enough.
Law-books in musty calf covered one wall, and elsewhere were
post-office directories, and other books of reference.  Papers in
packets tied with red tape were pigeon-holed around, and some iron
safes filled a recess, while the bare wood floor was, like the
door-step, stained by previous visitors.

The soldier was sullen and reluctant: the bride sad and timid; she
was soon, obviously, to become a mother, and she had a black eye.
Their little business was soon done, and the twain and their friends
straggled out, one of the witnesses saying casually to Jude and Sue
in passing, as if he had known them before: "See the couple just
come in?  Ha, ha!  That fellow is just out of gaol this morning.
She met him at the gaol gates, and brought him straight here.  She's
paying for everything."

Sue turned her head and saw an ill-favoured man, closely cropped,
with a broad-faced, pock-marked woman on his arm, ruddy with liquor
and the satisfaction of being on the brink of a gratified desire.
They jocosely saluted the outgoing couple, and went forward in front
of Jude and Sue, whose diffidence was increasing.  The latter drew
back and turned to her lover, her mouth shaping itself like that of
a child about to give way to grief:

"Jude--I don't like it here!  I wish we hadn't come!  The place gives
me the horrors: it seems so unnatural as the climax of our love!
I wish it had been at church, if it had to be at all.  It is not so
vulgar there!"

"Dear little girl," said Jude.  "How troubled and pale you look!"

"It must be performed here now, I suppose?"

"No--perhaps not necessarily."

He spoke to the clerk, and came back.  "No--we need not marry here or
anywhere, unless we like, even now," he said.  "We can be married in
a church, if not with the same certificate with another he'll give
us, I think.  Anyhow, let us go out till you are calmer, dear, and I
too, and talk it over."

They went out stealthily and guiltily, as if they had committed a
misdemeanour, closing the door without noise, and telling the widow,
who had remained in the entry, to go home and await them; that they
would call in any casual passers as witnesses, if necessary.  When
in the street they turned into an unfrequented side alley where they
walked up and down as they had done long ago in the market-house at
Melchester.

"Now, darling, what shall we do?  We are making a mess of it, it
strikes me.  Still, ANYTHING that pleases you will please me."

"But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you!  You wanted it to be there,
didn't you?"

"Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn't
care much about it.  The place depressed me almost as much as it
did you--it was ugly.  And then I thought of what you had said this
morning as to whether we ought."

They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began
anew: "It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this!  And yet how
much better than to act rashly a second time...  How terrible that
scene was to me!  The expression in that flabby woman's face, leading
her on to give herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she
would, but for a lifetime, as she must.  And the other poor soul--to
escape a nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her
character, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant
who scorned her--a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of
salvation...  This is our parish church, isn't it?  This is where
it would have to be, if we did it in the usual way?  A service or
something seems to be going on."

Jude went up and looked in at the door.  "Why--it is a wedding here
too," he said.  "Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day."

Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there
was always a crowd of marriages.  "Let us listen," she said, "and
find how it feels to us when performed in a church."

They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings
at the altar.  The contracting couple appeared to belong to the
well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary
prettiness and interest.  They could see the flowers tremble in the
bride's hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical
murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all
under the pressure of her self-consciousness.  Sue and Jude listened,
and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same form
of self-committal.

"It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it
over again with my present knowledge," Sue whispered.  "You see, they
are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course.
But having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at
least as I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings
perhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and
undertake the same thing again with open eyes.  Coming in here and
seeing this has frightened me from a church wedding as much as the
other did from a registry one...  We are a weak, tremulous pair,
Jude, and what others may feel confident in I feel doubts of--my
being proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract
again!"

Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them.  And Jude said he also thought they were
both too thin-skinned--that they ought never to have been born--much
less have come together for the most preposterous of all joint
ventures for THEM--matrimony.

His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed
felt that they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that
life-undertaking again?  "It is awful if you think we have found
ourselves not strong enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing
to perjure ourselves," she said.

"I fancy I do think it--since you ask me," said Jude.  "Remember I'll
do it if you wish, own darling."  While she hesitated he went on to
confess that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he
felt checked by the dread of incompetency just as she did--from their
peculiarities, perhaps, because they were unlike other people.  "We
are horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us,
Sue!" he declared.

"I fancy more are like us than we think!"

"Well, I don't know.  The intention of the contract is good, and
right for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends
because we are the queer sort of people we are--folk in whom domestic
ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."

Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:
that all were so.  "Everybody is getting to feel as we do.  We are
a little beforehand, that's all.  In fifty, a hundred, years the
descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we.  They
will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as

   Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,

and will be afraid to reproduce them."

"What a terrible line of poetry! ... though I have felt it myself
about my fellow-creatures, at morbid times."

Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly:

"Well--the general question is not our business, and why should we
plague ourselves about it?  However different our reasons are, we come
to the same conclusion: that for us particular two, an irrevocable
oath is risky.  Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream!
Yes?  How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!"

"They accord very much with my own."

He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of
everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession
entering the vestry; and then they came outside the building.  By the
door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for
a while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open
daylight.  Sue sighed.

"The flowers in the bride's hand are sadly like the garland which
decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!"

"Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the man.  That's
what some women fail to see, and instead of protesting against the
conditions they protest against the man, the other victim; just as a
woman in a crowd will abuse the man who crushes against her, when he
is only the helpless transmitter of the pressure put upon him."

"Yes--some are like that, instead of uniting with the man against
the common enemy, coercion."  The bride and bridegroom had by this
time driven off, and the two moved away with the rest of the idlers.
"No--don't let's do it," she continued.  "At least, just now."

They reached home, and passing the window arm in arm saw the widow
looking out at them.  "Well," cried their guest when they entered, "I
said to myself when I zeed ye coming so loving up to the door, 'They
made up their minds at last, then!'"

They briefly hinted that they had not.

"What--and ha'n't ye really done it?  Chok' it all, that I should
have lived to see a good old saying like 'marry in haste and repent
at leisure' spoiled like this by you two!  'Tis time I got back again
to Marygreen--sakes if tidden--if this is what the new notions be
leading us to!  Nobody thought o' being afeard o' matrimony in my
time, nor of much else but a cannon-ball or empty cupboard!  Why when
I and my poor man were married we thought no more o't than of a game
o' dibs!"

"Don't tell the child when he comes in," whispered Sue nervously.
"He'll think it has all gone on right, and it will be better that he
should not be surprised and puzzled.  Of course it is only put off
for reconsideration.  If we are happy as we are, what does it matter
to anybody?"

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

completion: The morning after the boy arrives, Jude and Sue discover he is called Little Father Time because, as he says, he looks so old. Jude and Sue give notice of their wedding and invite Mrs. Edlin, the widow who took care of his aunt, to come. The night before they are to marry, Mrs. Edlin tells a tale about a man hanged near the Brown House, a man who may have been an ancestor of Sue and Jude. The next day they go to marry at the registry office, but after watching other couples, first Sue and then Jude decide the setting is too sordid. They go to a parish church to watch a wedding, but they agree they can't go through with a ceremony like that they both experienced before. They decide that the compulsion of marriage is not for such as they, and Sue says, "If we are happy as we are, what does it matter to anybody?"


prompt:
Chapter: The purpose of a chronicler of moods and deeds does not require him
to express his personal views upon the grave controversy above given.
That the twain were happy--between their times of sadness--was
indubitable.  And when the unexpected apparition of Jude's child
in the house had shown itself to be no such disturbing event as it
had looked, but one that brought into their lives a new and tender
interest of an ennobling and unselfish kind, it rather helped than
injured their happiness.

To be sure, with such pleasing anxious beings as they were, the boy's
coming also brought with it much thought for the future, particularly
as he seemed at present to be singularly deficient in all the usual
hopes of childhood.  But the pair tried to dismiss, for a while at
least, a too strenuously forward view.

There is in Upper Wessex an old town of nine or ten thousand souls;
the town may be called Stoke-Barehills.  It stands with its gaunt,
unattractive, ancient church, and its new red brick suburb, amid
the open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary
triangle which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham
and Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot.
The great western highway from London passes through it, near a point
where the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty
miles further westward.  Out of this bifurcation and reunion there
used to arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days, endless
questions of choice between the respective ways.  But the question
is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder, the road waggoner,
and the mail coachman who disputed it; and probably not a single
inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even aware that the two roads
which part in his town ever meet again; for nobody now drives up and
down the great western highway dally.

The most familiar object in Stoke-Barehills nowadays is its cemetery,
standing among some picturesque mediaeval ruins beside the railway;
the modern chapels, modern tombs, and modern shrubs having a look of
intrusiveness amid the crumbling and ivy-covered decay of the ancient
walls.

On a certain day, however, in the particular year which has now been
reached by this narrative--the month being early June--the features
of the town excite little interest, though many visitors arrive by
the trains; some down-trains, in especial, nearly emptying themselves
here.  It is the week of the Great Wessex Agricultural Show, whose
vast encampment spreads over the open outskirts of the town like
the tents of an investing army.  Rows of marquees, huts, booths,
pavilions, arcades, porticoes--every kind of structure short of
a permanent one--cover the green field for the space of a square
half-mile, and the crowds of arrivals walk through the town in
a mass, and make straight for the exhibition ground.  The way
thereto is lined with shows, stalls, and hawkers on foot, who make
a market-place of the whole roadway to the show proper, and lead
some of the improvident to lighten their pockets appreciably before
they reach the gates of the exhibition they came expressly to see.

It is the popular day, the shilling day, and of the fast arriving
excursion trains two from different directions enter the two
contiguous railway stations at almost the same minute.  One, like
several which have preceded it, comes from London: the other by a
cross-line from Aldbrickham; and from the London train alights a
couple; a short, rather bloated man, with a globular stomach and
small legs, resembling a top on two pegs, accompanied by a woman of
rather fine figure and rather red face, dressed in black material,
and covered with beads from bonnet to skirt, that made her glisten
as if clad in chain-mail.

They cast their eyes around.  The man was about to hire a fly as some
others had done, when the woman said, "Don't be in such a hurry,
Cartlett.  It isn't so very far to the show-yard.  Let us walk down
the street into the place.  Perhaps I can pick up a cheap bit of
furniture or old china.  It is years since I was here--never since
I lived as a girl at Aldbrickham, and used to come across for a trip
sometimes with my young man."

"You can't carry home furniture by excursion train," said, in a thick
voice, her husband, the landlord of The Three Horns, Lambeth; for
they had both come down from the tavern in that "excellent, densely
populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood," which they had occupied ever
since the advertisement in those words had attracted them thither.
The configuration of the landlord showed that he, too, like his
customers, was becoming affected by the liquors he retailed.

"Then I'll get it sent, if I see any worth having," said his wife.

They sauntered on, but had barely entered the town when her attention
was attracted by a young couple leading a child, who had come out
from the second platform, into which the train from Aldbrickham had
steamed.  They were walking just in front of the inn-keepers.

"Sakes alive!" said Arabella.

"What's that?" said Cartlett.

"Who do you think that couple is?  Don't you recognize the man?"

"No."

"Not from the photos I have showed you?"

"Is it Fawley?"

"Yes--of course."

"Oh, well.  I suppose he was inclined for a little sight-seeing like
the rest of us."  Cartlett's interest in Jude whatever it might have
been when Arabella was new to him, had plainly flagged since her
charms and her idiosyncrasies, her supernumerary hair-coils, and her
optional dimples, were becoming as a tale that is told.

Arabella so regulated her pace and her husband's as to keep just in
the rear of the other three, which it was easy to do without notice
in such a stream of pedestrians.  Her answers to Cartlett's remarks
were vague and slight, for the group in front interested her more
than all the rest of the spectacle.

"They are rather fond of one another and of their child, seemingly,"
continued the publican.

"THEIR child!  'Tisn't their child," said Arabella with a curious,
sudden covetousness.  "They haven't been married long enough for it
to be theirs!"

But although the smouldering maternal instinct was strong enough
in her to lead her to quash her husband's conjecture, she was not
disposed on second thoughts to be more candid than necessary.  Mr.
Cartlett had no other idea than that his wife's child by her first
husband was with his grandparents at the Antipodes.

"Oh I suppose not.  She looks quite a girl."

"They are only lovers, or lately married, and have the child in
charge, as anybody can see."

All continued to move ahead.  The unwitting Sue and Jude, the couple
in question, had determined to make this agricultural exhibition
within twenty miles of their own town the occasion of a day's
excursion which should combine exercise and amusement with
instruction, at small expense.  Not regardful of themselves alone,
they had taken care to bring Father Time, to try every means of
making him kindle and laugh like other boys, though he was to
some extent a hindrance to the delightfully unreserved intercourse
in their pilgrimages which they so much enjoyed.  But they soon
ceased to consider him an observer, and went along with that tender
attention to each other which the shyest can scarcely disguise, and
which these, among entire strangers as they imagined, took less
trouble to disguise than they might have done at home.  Sue, in her
new summer clothes, flexible and light as a bird, her little thumb
stuck up by the stem of her white cotton sunshade, went along as if
she hardly touched ground, and as if a moderately strong puff of wind
would float her over the hedge into the next field.  Jude, in his
light grey holiday-suit, was really proud of her companionship, not
more for her external attractiveness than for her sympathetic words
and ways.  That complete mutual understanding, in which every glance
and movement was as effectual as speech for conveying intelligence
between them, made them almost the two parts of a single whole.

The pair with their charge passed through the turnstiles, Arabella
and her husband not far behind them.  When inside the enclosure the
publican's wife could see that the two ahead began to take trouble
with the youngster, pointing out and explaining the many objects of
interest, alive and dead; and a passing sadness would touch their
faces at their every failure to disturb his indifference.

"How she sticks to him!" said Arabella.  "Oh no--I fancy they are not
married, or they wouldn't be so much to one another as that...  I
wonder!"

"But I thought you said he did marry her?"

"I heard he was going to--that's all, going to make another attempt,
after putting it off once or twice...  As far as they themselves are
concerned they are the only two in the show.  I should be ashamed of
making myself so silly if I were he!"

"I don't see as how there's anything remarkable in their behaviour.
I should never have noticed their being in love, if you hadn't said
so."

"You never see anything," she rejoined.  Nevertheless Cartlett's view
of the lovers' or married pair's conduct was undoubtedly that of the
general crowd, whose attention seemed to be in no way attracted by
what Arabella's sharpened vision discerned.

"He's charmed by her as if she were some fairy!" continued Arabella.
"See how he looks round at her, and lets his eyes rest on her.  I am
inclined to think that she don't care for him quite so much as he
does for her.  She's not a particular warm-hearted creature to my
thinking, though she cares for him pretty middling much--as much as
she's able to; and he could make her heart ache a bit if he liked to
try--which he's too simple to do.  There--now they are going across
to the cart-horse sheds.  Come along."

"I don't want to see the cart-horses.  It is no business of ours to
follow these two.  If we have come to see the show let us see it in
our own way, as they do in theirs."

"Well--suppose we agree to meet somewhere in an hour's time--say at
that refreshment tent over there, and go about independent?  Then you
can look at what you choose to, and so can I."

Cartlett was not loath to agree to this, and they parted--he
proceeding to the shed where malting processes were being exhibited,
and Arabella in the direction taken by Jude and Sue.  Before,
however, she had regained their wake a laughing face met her own,
and she was confronted by Anny, the friend of her girlhood.

Anny had burst out in hearty laughter at the mere fact of the chance
encounter.  "I am still living down there," she said, as soon as
she was composed.  "I am soon going to be married, but my intended
couldn't come up here to-day.  But there's lots of us come by
excursion, though I've lost the rest of 'em for the present."

"Have you met Jude and his young woman, or wife, or whatever she is?
I saw 'em by now."

"No. Not a glimpse of un for years!"

"Well, they are close by here somewhere.  Yes--there they are--by
that grey horse!"

"Oh, that's his present young woman--wife did you say?  Has he
married again?"

"I don't know."

"She's pretty, isn't she!"

"Yes--nothing to complain of; or jump at.  Not much to depend on,
though; a slim, fidgety little thing like that."

"He's a nice-looking chap, too!  You ought to ha' stuck to un,
Arabella."

"I don't know but I ought," murmured she.

Anny laughed.  "That's you, Arabella!  Always wanting another man
than your own."

"Well, and what woman don't I should like to know?  As for that body
with him--she don't know what love is--at least what I call love!  I
can see in her face she don't."

"And perhaps, Abby dear, you don't know what she calls love."

"I'm sure I don't wish to! ...  Ah--they are making for the art
department.  I should like to see some pictures myself.  Suppose
we go that way?--  Why, if all Wessex isn't here, I verily believe!
There's Dr. Vilbert.  Haven't seen him for years, and he's not
looking a day older than when I used to know him.  How do you do,
Physician?  I was just saying that you don't look a day older than
when you knew me as a girl."

"Simply the result of taking my own pills regular, ma'am. Only two
and threepence a box--warranted efficacious by the Government stamp.
Now let me advise you to purchase the same immunity from the ravages
of time by following my example?  Only two-and-three."

The physician had produced a box from his waistcoat pocket, and
Arabella was induced to make the purchase.

"At the same time," continued he, when the pills were paid for, "you
have the advantage of me, Mrs.--  Surely not Mrs. Fawley, once Miss
Donn, of the vicinity of Marygreen?"

"Yes.  But Mrs. Cartlett now."

"Ah--you lost him, then?  Promising young fellow!  A pupil of mine,
you know.  I taught him the dead languages.  And believe me, he soon
knew nearly as much as I."

"I lost him; but not as you think," said Arabella dryly.  "The
lawyers untied us.  There he is, look, alive and lusty; along with
that young woman, entering the art exhibition."

"Ah--dear me!  Fond of her, apparently."

"They SAY they are cousins."

"Cousinship is a great convenience to their feelings, I should say?"

"Yes.  So her husband thought, no doubt, when he divorced
her...  Shall we look at the pictures, too?"

The trio followed across the green and entered.  Jude and Sue, with
the child, unaware of the interest they were exciting, had gone
up to a model at one end of the building, which they regarded
with considerable attention for a long while before they went
on.  Arabella and her friends came to it in due course, and the
inscription it bore was: "Model of Cardinal College, Christminster;
by J. Fawley and S. F. M. Bridehead."

"Admiring their own work," said Arabella.  "How like Jude--always
thinking of colleges and Christminster, instead of attending to his
business!"

They glanced cursorily at the pictures, and proceeded to the
band-stand.  When they had stood a little while listening to the
music of the military performers, Jude, Sue, and the child came up on
the other side.  Arabella did not care if they should recognize her;
but they were too deeply absorbed in their own lives, as translated
into emotion by the military band, to perceive her under her beaded
veil.  She walked round the outside of the listening throng, passing
behind the lovers, whose movements had an unexpected fascination for
her to-day.  Scrutinizing them narrowly from the rear she noticed
that Jude's hand sought Sue's as they stood, the two standing close
together so as to conceal, as they supposed, this tacit expression
of their mutual responsiveness.

"Silly fools--like two children!"  Arabella whispered to herself
morosely, as she rejoined her companions, with whom she preserved a
preoccupied silence.

Anny meanwhile had jokingly remarked to Vilbert on Arabella's
hankering interest in her first husband.

"Now," said the physician to Arabella, apart; "do you want anything
such as this, Mrs. Cartlett?  It is not compounded out of my regular
pharmacopoeia, but I am sometimes asked for such a thing."  He
produced a small phial of clear liquid.  "A love-philtre, such as was
used by the ancients with great effect.  I found it out by study of
their writings, and have never known it to fail."

"What is it made of?" asked Arabella curiously.

"Well--a distillation of the juices of doves' hearts--otherwise
pigeons'--is one of the ingredients.  It took nearly a hundred hearts
to produce that small bottle full."

"How do you get pigeons enough?"

"To tell a secret, I get a piece of rock-salt, of which pigeons are
inordinately fond, and place it in a dovecot on my roof.  In a few
hours the birds come to it from all points of the compass--east,
west, north, and south--and thus I secure as many as I require.
You use the liquid by contriving that the desired man shall take
about ten drops of it in his drink.  But remember, all this is told
you because I gather from your questions that you mean to be a
purchaser.  You must keep faith with me?"

"Very well--I don't mind a bottle--to give some friend or other to
try it on her young man."  She produced five shillings, the price
asked, and slipped the phial in her capacious bosom.  Saying
presently that she was due at an appointment with her husband, she
sauntered away towards the refreshment bar, Jude, his companion, and
the child having gone on to the horticultural tent, where Arabella
caught a glimpse of them standing before a group of roses in bloom.

She waited a few minutes observing them, and then proceeded to join
her spouse with no very amiable sentiments.  She found him seated on
a stool by the bar, talking to one of the gaily dressed maids who had
served him with spirits.

"I should think you had enough of this business at home!" Arabella
remarked gloomily.  "Surely you didn't come fifty miles from your own
bar to stick in another?  Come, take me round the show, as other men
do their wives!  Dammy, one would think you were a young bachelor,
with nobody to look after but yourself!"

"But we agreed to meet here; and what could I do but wait?"

"Well, now we have met, come along," she returned, ready to quarrel
with the sun for shining on her.  And they left the tent together,
this pot-bellied man and florid woman, in the antipathetic,
recriminatory mood of the average husband and wife of Christendom.

In the meantime the more exceptional couple and the boy still
lingered in the pavilion of flowers--an enchanted palace to their
appreciative taste--Sue's usually pale cheeks reflecting the pink of
the tinted roses at which she gazed; for the gay sights, the air, the
music, and the excitement of a day's outing with Jude had quickened
her blood and made her eyes sparkle with vivacity.  She adored roses,
and what Arabella had witnessed was Sue detaining Jude almost against
his will while she learnt the names of this variety and that, and put
her face within an inch of their blooms to smell them.

"I should like to push my face quite into them--the dears!" she had
said.  "But I suppose it is against the rules to touch them--isn't
it, Jude?"

"Yes, you baby," said he: and then playfully gave her a little push,
so that her nose went among the petals.

"The policeman will be down on us, and I shall say it was my
husband's fault!"

Then she looked up at him, and smiled in a way that told so much to
Arabella.

"Happy?" he murmured.

She nodded.

"Why?  Because you have come to the great Wessex Agricultural
Show--or because WE have come?"

"You are always trying to make me confess to all sorts of
absurdities.  Because I am improving my mind, of course, by seeing
all these steam-ploughs, and threshing-machines, and chaff-cutters,
and cows, and pigs, and sheep."

Jude was quite content with a baffle from his ever evasive companion.
But when he had forgotten that he had put the question, and because
he no longer wished for an answer, she went on: "I feel that we have
returned to Greek joyousness, and have blinded ourselves to sickness
and sorrow, and have forgotten what twenty-five centuries have taught
the race since their time, as one of your Christminster luminaries
says...  There is one immediate shadow, however--only one."  And
she looked at the aged child, whom, though they had taken him to
everything likely to attract a young intelligence, they had utterly
failed to interest.

He knew what they were saying and thinking.  "I am very, very sorry,
Father and Mother," he said.  "But please don't mind!--I can't help
it.  I should like the flowers very very much, if I didn't keep on
thinking they'd be all withered in a few days!"

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

completion: At the agricultural show at Stoke-Barehills Arabella, arriving with her husband, sees Jude, Sue, and the boy and follows after them, commenting on them to Cartlett. Leaving him to go his own way, Arabella encounters a girl friend and then Physician Vilbert. They follow Jude and Sue to the art department, where the couple view a model of one of the Christminster colleges they have made. Arabella jokingly buys a "love-philtre" from Vilbert and then goes off to join her husband. Meanwhile at the pavilion of flowers Sue ecstatically admires the roses, and she and Jude agree they are happy, though conscious of the gloomy face of Little Father Time beside them.


prompt:
Chapter: The unnoticed lives that the pair had hitherto led began, from the
day of the suspended wedding onwards, to be observed and discussed by
other persons than Arabella.  The society of Spring Street and the
neighbourhood generally did not understand, and probably could not
have been made to understand, Sue and Jude's private minds, emotions,
positions, and fears.  The curious facts of a child coming to them
unexpectedly, who called Jude "Father," and Sue "Mother," and a hitch
in a marriage ceremony intended for quietness to be performed at a
registrar's office, together with rumours of the undefended cases in
the law-courts, bore only one translation to plain minds.

Little Time--for though he was formally turned into "Jude," the apt
nickname stuck to him--would come home from school in the evening,
and repeat inquiries and remarks that had been made to him by the
other boys; and cause Sue, and Jude when he heard them, a great deal
of pain and sadness.

The result was that shortly after the attempt at the registrar's the
pair went off--to London it was believed--for several days, hiring
somebody to look to the boy.  When they came back they let it be
understood indirectly, and with total indifference and weariness
of mien, that they were legally married at last.  Sue, who had
previously been called Mrs. Bridehead now openly adopted the name of
Mrs. Fawley.  Her dull, cowed, and listless manner for days seemed
to substantiate all this.

But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so secretly
to do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and
they found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as
they had expected to do thereby.  A living mystery was not much less
interesting than a dead scandal.

The baker's lad and the grocer's boy, who at first had used to lift
their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands,
in these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage,
and the neighbouring artizans' wives looked straight along the
pavement when they encountered her.

Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive atmosphere began
to encircle their souls, particularly after their excursion to the
show, as if that visit had brought some evil influence to bear on
them.  And their temperaments were precisely of a kind to suffer from
this atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous and
open statements.  Their apparent attempt at reparation had come too
late to be effective.

The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months
later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return
to journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now,
in that he had not as yet cleared off the debt he had unavoidably
incurred in the payment of the law-costs of the previous year.

One evening he sat down to share the common meal with Sue and the
child as usual.  "I am thinking," he said to her, "that I'll hold on
here no longer.  The life suits us, certainly; but if we could get
away to a place where we are unknown, we should be lighter hearted,
and have a better chance.  And so I am afraid we must break it up
here, however awkward for you, poor dear!"

Sue was always much affected at a picture of herself as an object of
pity, and she saddened.

"Well--I am not sorry," said she presently.  "I am much depressed
by the way they look at me here.  And you have been keeping on this
house and furniture entirely for me and the boy!  You don't want
it yourself, and the expense is unnecessary.  But whatever we do,
wherever we go, you won't take him away from me, Jude dear?  I could
not let him go now!  The cloud upon his young mind makes him so
pathetic to me; I do hope to lift it some day!  And he loves me so.
You won't take him away from me?"

"Certainly I won't, dear little girl!  We'll get nice lodgings,
wherever we go.  I shall be moving about probably--getting a job
here and a job there."

"I shall do something too, of course, till--till--  Well, now I can't
be useful in the lettering it behoves me to turn my hand to something
else."

"Don't hurry about getting employment," he said regretfully.  "I
don't want you to do that.  I wish you wouldn't, Sue.  The boy and
yourself are enough for you to attend to."

There was a knock at the door, and Jude answered it.  Sue could hear
the conversation:

"Is Mr. Fawley at home? ...  Biles and Willis, the building
contractors, sent me to know if you'll undertake the relettering
of the ten commandments in a little church they've been restoring
lately in the country near here."

Jude reflected, and said he could undertake it.

"It is not a very artistic job," continued the messenger.  "The
clergyman is a very old-fashioned chap, and he has refused to let
anything more be done to the church than cleaning and repairing."

"Excellent old man!" said Sue to herself, who was sentimentally
opposed to the horrors of over-restoration.

"The Ten Commandments are fixed to the east end," the messenger went
on, "and they want doing up with the rest of the wall there, since
he won't have them carted off as old materials belonging to the
contractor in the usual way of the trade."

A bargain as to terms was struck, and Jude came indoors.  "There, you
see," he said cheerfully.  "One more job yet, at any rate, and you
can help in it--at least you can try.  We shall have all the church
to ourselves, as the rest of the work is finished."

Next day Jude went out to the church, which was only two miles
off.  He found that what the contractor's clerk had said was true.
The tables of the Jewish law towered sternly over the utensils of
Christian grace, as the chief ornament of the chancel end, in the
fine dry style of the last century.  And as their framework was
constructed of ornamental plaster they could not be taken down for
repair.  A portion, crumbled by damp, required renewal; and when
this had been done, and the whole cleansed, he began to renew the
lettering.  On the second morning Sue came to see what assistance
she could render, and also because they liked to be together.

The silence and emptiness of the building gave her confidence, and,
standing on a safe low platform erected by Jude, which she was
nevertheless timid at mounting, she began painting in the letters
of the first Table while he set about mending a portion of the
second.  She was quite pleased at her powers; she had acquired them
in the days she painted illumined texts for the church-fitting shop
at Christminster.  Nobody seemed likely to disturb them; and the
pleasant twitter of birds, and rustle of October leafage, came in
through an open window, and mingled with their talk.

They were not, however, to be left thus snug and peaceful for long.
About half-past twelve there came footsteps on the gravel without.
The old vicar and his churchwarden entered, and, coming up to see
what was being done, seemed surprised to discover that a young woman
was assisting.  They passed on into an aisle, at which time the door
again opened, and another figure entered--a small one, that of little
Time, who was crying.  Sue had told him where he might find her
between school-hours, if he wished.  She came down from her perch,
and said, "What's the matter, my dear?"

"I couldn't stay to eat my dinner in school, because they said--"
He described how some boys had taunted him about his nominal mother,
and Sue, grieved, expressed her indignation to Jude aloft.  The child
went into the churchyard, and Sue returned to her work.  Meanwhile
the door had opened again, and there shuffled in with a businesslike
air the white-aproned woman who cleaned the church.  Sue recognized
her as one who had friends in Spring Street, whom she visited.  The
church-cleaner looked at Sue, gaped, and lifted her hands; she had
evidently recognized Jude's companion as the latter had recognized
her.  Next came two ladies, and after talking to the charwoman they
also moved forward, and as Sue stood reaching upward, watched her
hand tracing the letters, and critically regarded her person in
relief against the white wall, till she grew so nervous that she
trembled visibly.

They went back to where the others were standing, talking in
undertones: and one said--Sue could not hear which--"She's his wife,
I suppose?"

"Some say Yes: some say No," was the reply from the charwoman.

"Not?  Then she ought to be, or somebody's--that's very clear!"

"They've only been married a very few weeks, whether or no."

"A strange pair to be painting the Two Tables!  I wonder Biles and
Willis could think of such a thing as hiring those!"

The churchwarden supposed that Biles and Willis knew of nothing
wrong, and then the other, who had been talking to the old woman,
explained what she meant by calling them strange people.

The probable drift of the subdued conversation which followed was
made plain by the churchwarden breaking into an anecdote, in a voice
that everybody in the church could hear, though obviously suggested
by the present situation:

"Well, now, it is a curious thing, but my grandfather told me a
strange tale of a most immoral case that happened at the painting of
the Commandments in a church out by Gaymead--which is quite within a
walk of this one.  In them days Commandments were mostly done in gilt
letters on a black ground, and that's how they were out where I say,
before the owld church was rebuilded.  It must have been somewhere
about a hundred years ago that them Commandments wanted doing up just
as ours do here, and they had to get men from Aldbrickham to do 'em.
Now they wished to get the job finished by a particular Sunday, so
the men had to work late Saturday night, against their will, for
overtime was not paid then as 'tis now.  There was no true religion
in the country at that date, neither among pa'sons, clerks, nor
people, and to keep the men up to their work the vicar had to let 'em
have plenty of drink during the afternoon.  As evening drawed on they
sent for some more themselves; rum, by all account.  It got later and
later, and they got more and more fuddled, till at last they went
a-putting their rum-bottle and rummers upon the communion table, and
drawed up a trestle or two, and sate round comfortable and poured
out again right hearty bumpers.  No sooner had they tossed off their
glasses than, so the story goes, they fell down senseless, one and
all.  How long they bode so they didn't know, but when they came
to themselves there was a terrible thunder-storm a-raging, and
they seemed to see in the gloom a dark figure with very thin legs
and a curious voot, a-standing on the ladder, and finishing their
work.  When it got daylight they could see that the work was really
finished, and couldn't at all mind finishing it themselves.  They
went home, and the next thing they heard was that a great scandal had
been caused in the church that Sunday morning, for when the people
came and service began, all saw that the Ten Commandments wez painted
with the 'nots' left out.  Decent people wouldn't attend service
there for a long time, and the Bishop had to be sent for to
reconsecrate the church.  That's the tradition as I used to hear it
as a child.  You must take it for what it is wo'th, but this case
to-day has reminded me o't, as I say."

The visitors gave one more glance, as if to see whether Jude and
Sue had left the "nots" out likewise, and then severally left the
church, even the old woman at last.  Sue and Jude, who had not
stopped working, sent back the child to school, and remained without
speaking; till, looking at her narrowly, he found she had been crying
silently.

"Never mind, comrade!" he said.  "I know what it is!"

"I can't BEAR that they, and everybody, should think people wicked
because they may have chosen to live their own way!  It is really
these opinions that make the best intentioned people reckless, and
actually become immoral!"

"Never be cast down!  It was only a funny story."

"Ah, but we suggested it!  I am afraid I have done you mischief,
Jude, instead of helping you by coming!"

To have suggested such a story was certainly not very exhilarating,
in a serious view of their position.  However, in a few minutes Sue
seemed to see that their position this morning had a ludicrous side,
and wiping her eyes she laughed.

"It is droll, after all," she said, "that we two, of all people,
with our queer history, should happen to be here painting the
Ten Commandments!  You a reprobate, and I--in my condition...  O
dear!" ...  And with her hand over her eyes she laughed again
silently and intermittently, till she was quite weak.

"That's better," said Jude gaily.  "Now we are right again, aren't
we, little girl!"

"Oh but it is serious, all the same!" she sighed as she took up the
brush and righted herself.  "But do you see they don't think we are
married?  They WON'T believe it!  It is extraordinary!"

"I don't care whether they think so or not," said Jude.  "I shan't
take any more trouble to make them."

They sat down to lunch--which they had brought with them not to
hinder time--and having eaten it, were about to set to work anew when
a man entered the church, and Jude recognized in him the contractor
Willis.  He beckoned to Jude, and spoke to him apart.

"Here--I've just had a complaint about this," he said, with rather
breathless awkwardness.  "I don't wish to go into the matter--as of
course I didn't know what was going on--but I am afraid I must ask
you and her to leave off, and let somebody else finish this!  It is
best, to avoid all unpleasantness.  I'll pay you for the week, all
the same."

Jude was too independent to make any fuss; and the contractor paid
him, and left.  Jude picked up his tools, and Sue cleansed her brush.
Then their eyes met.

"How could we be so simple as to suppose we might do this!" said
she, dropping to her tragic note.  "Of course we ought not--I ought
not--to have come!"

"I had no idea that anybody was going to intrude into such a lonely
place and see us!"  Jude returned.  "Well, it can't be helped, dear;
and of course I wouldn't wish to injure Willis's trade-connection by
staying."  They sat down passively for a few minutes, proceeded out
of the church, and overtaking the boy pursued their thoughtful way
to Aldbrickham.

Fawley had still a pretty zeal in the cause of education, and, as was
natural with his experiences, he was active in furthering "equality
of opportunity" by any humble means open to him.  He had joined an
Artizans' Mutual Improvement Society established in the town about
the time of his arrival there; its members being young men of all
creeds and denominations, including Churchmen, Congregationalists,
Baptists, Unitarians, Positivists, and others--Agnostics had scarcely
been heard of at this time--their one common wish to enlarge their
minds forming a sufficiently close bond of union.  The subscription
was small, and the room homely; and Jude's activity, uncustomary
acquirements, and, above all, singular intuition on what to read
and how to set about it--begotten of his years of struggle against
malignant stars--had led to his being placed on the committee.

A few evenings after his dismissal from the church repairs, and
before he had obtained any more work to do, he went to attend a
meeting of the aforesaid committee.  It was late when he arrived: all
the others had come, and as he entered they looked dubiously at him,
and hardly uttered a word of greeting.  He guessed that something
bearing on himself had been either discussed or mooted.  Some
ordinary business was transacted, and it was disclosed that the
number of subscriptions had shown a sudden falling off for that
quarter.  One member--a really well-meaning and upright man--began
speaking in enigmas about certain possible causes: that it behoved
them to look well into their constitution; for if the committee were
not respected, and had not at least, in their differences, a common
standard of CONDUCT, they would bring the institution to the ground.
Nothing further was said in Jude's presence, but he knew what this
meant; and turning to the table wrote a note resigning his office
there and then.

Thus the supersensitive couple were more and more impelled to go
away.  And then bills were sent in, and the question arose, what
could Jude do with his great-aunt's heavy old furniture, if he left
the town to travel he knew not whither?  This, and the necessity of
ready money, compelled him to decide on an auction, much as he would
have preferred to keep the venerable goods.

The day of the sale came on; and Sue for the last time cooked her
own, the child's, and Jude's breakfast in the little house he had
furnished.  It chanced to be a wet day; moreover Sue was unwell, and
not wishing to desert her poor Jude in such gloomy circumstances,
for he was compelled to stay awhile, she acted on the suggestion of
the auctioneer's man, and ensconced herself in an upper room, which
could be emptied of its effects, and so kept closed to the bidders.
Here Jude discovered her; and with the child, and their few trunks,
baskets, and bundles, and two chairs and a table that were not in
the sale, the two sat in meditative talk.

Footsteps began stamping up and down the bare stairs, the comers
inspecting the goods, some of which were of so quaint and ancient a
make as to acquire an adventitious value as art.  Their door was
tried once or twice, and to guard themselves against intrusion Jude
wrote "Private" on a scrap of paper, and stuck it upon the panel.

They soon found that, instead of the furniture, their own personal
histories and past conduct began to be discussed to an unexpected
and intolerable extent by the intending bidders.  It was not till
now that they really discovered what a fools' paradise of supposed
unrecognition they had been living in of late.  Sue silently took
her companion's hand, and with eyes on each other they heard these
passing remarks--the quaint and mysterious personality of Father
Time being a subject which formed a large ingredient in the hints and
innuendoes.  At length the auction began in the room below, whence
they could hear each familiar article knocked down, the highly prized
ones cheaply, the unconsidered at an unexpected price.

"People don't understand us," he sighed heavily.  "I am glad we have
decided to go."

"The question is, where to?"

"It ought to be to London.  There one can live as one chooses."

"No--not London, dear!  I know it well.  We should be unhappy there."

"Why?"

"Can't you think?"

"Because Arabella is there?"

"That's the chief reason."

"But in the country I shall always be uneasy lest there should be
some more of our late experience.  And I don't care to lessen it by
explaining, for one thing, all about the boy's history.  To cut him
off from his past I have determined to keep silence.  I am sickened
of ecclesiastical work now; and I shouldn't like to accept it, if
offered me!"

"You ought to have learnt classic.  Gothic is barbaric art, after
all.  Pugin was wrong, and Wren was right.  Remember the interior of
Christminster Cathedral--almost the first place in which we looked
in each other's faces.  Under the picturesqueness of those Norman
details one can see the grotesque childishness of uncouth people
trying to imitate the vanished Roman forms, remembered by dim
tradition only."

"Yes--you have half-converted me to that view by what you have said
before.  But one can work, and despise what one does.  I must do
something, if not church-gothic."

"I wish we could both follow an occupation in which personal
circumstances don't count," she said, smiling up wistfully.  "I am
as disqualified for teaching as you are for ecclesiastical art.  You
must fall back upon railway stations, bridges, theatres, music-halls,
hotels--everything that has no connection with conduct."

"I am not skilled in those...  I ought to take to bread-baking.  I
grew up in the baking business with aunt, you know.  But even a baker
must be conventional, to get customers."

"Unless he keeps a cake and gingerbread stall at markets and fairs,
where people are gloriously indifferent to everything except the
quality of the goods."

Their thoughts were diverted by the voice of the auctioneer: "Now
this antique oak settle--a unique example of old English furniture,
worthy the attention of all collectors!"

"That was my great-grandfather's," said Jude.  "I wish we could have
kept the poor old thing!"

One by one the articles went, and the afternoon passed away.  Jude
and the other two were getting tired and hungry, but after the
conversation they had heard they were shy of going out while the
purchasers were in their line of retreat.  However, the later lots
drew on, and it became necessary to emerge into the rain soon, to
take on Sue's things to their temporary lodging.

"Now the next lot: two pairs of pigeons, all alive and plump--a nice
pie for somebody for next Sunday's dinner!"

The impending sale of these birds had been the most trying suspense
of the whole afternoon.  They were Sue's pets, and when it was found
that they could not possibly be kept, more sadness was caused than by
parting from all the furniture.  Sue tried to think away her tears
as she heard the trifling sum that her dears were deemed to be worth
advanced by small stages to the price at which they were finally
knocked down.  The purchaser was a neighbouring poulterer, and they
were unquestionably doomed to die before the next market day.

Noting her dissembled distress Jude kissed her, and said it was time
to go and see if the lodgings were ready.  He would go on with the
boy, and fetch her soon.

When she was left alone she waited patiently, but Jude did not come
back.  At last she started, the coast being clear, and on passing the
poulterer's shop, not far off, she saw her pigeons in a hamper by the
door.  An emotion at sight of them, assisted by the growing dusk of
evening, caused her to act on impulse, and first looking around her
quickly, she pulled out the peg which fastened down the cover, and
went on.  The cover was lifted from within, and the pigeons flew
away with a clatter that brought the chagrined poulterer cursing and
swearing to the door.

Sue reached the lodging trembling, and found Jude and the boy making
it comfortable for her.  "Do the buyers pay before they bring away
the things?" she asked breathlessly.

"Yes, I think.  Why?"

"Because, then, I've done such a wicked thing!"  And she explained,
in bitter contrition.

"I shall have to pay the poulterer for them, if he doesn't catch
them," said Jude.  "But never mind.  Don't fret about it, dear."

"It was so foolish of me!  Oh why should Nature's law be mutual
butchery!"

"Is it so, Mother?" asked the boy intently.

"Yes!" said Sue vehemently.

"Well, they must take their chance, now, poor things," said Jude.
"As soon as the sale-account is wound up, and our bills paid, we go."

"Where do we go to?" asked Time, in suspense.

"We must sail under sealed orders, that nobody may trace us...  We
mustn't go to Alfredston, or to Melchester, or to Shaston, or to
Christminster.  Apart from those we may go anywhere."

"Why mustn't we go there, Father?"

"Because of a cloud that has gathered over us; though 'we have
wronged no man, corrupted no man, defrauded no man!'  Though perhaps
we have 'done that which was right in our own eyes.'"

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

completion: To stop the talk about them, Jude and Sue go off to London for a few days as if to marry, but the talk continues and Jude thinks they should move to where they are unknown. Several incidents confirm this idea: Jude loses a job at a church when, because of Sue's presence there, he is recognized and the rumors about them are repeated; Little Father Time is taunted at school by other boys; Jude feels pressured to resign from the committee governing an artisans' improvement society he belongs to. Since they plan to live in lodgings instead of a house and also since they need money, Jude auctions off most of their household effects. They aren't sure where they'll go, but not to London, and since Jude is dissatisfied with church work he isn't sure what he'll do. Sue is upset by the sale of her pet pigeons, turns them loose later at the shop of the poulterer who bought them, and remarks bitterly, "0 why should Nature's law be mutual butchery!"


prompt:
Chapter: From that week Jude Fawley and Sue walked no more in the town of
Aldbrickham.

Whither they had gone nobody knew, chiefly because nobody cared
to know.  Any one sufficiently curious to trace the steps of such
an obscure pair might have discovered without great trouble that
they had taken advantage of his adaptive craftsmanship to enter
on a shifting, almost nomadic, life, which was not without its
pleasantness for a time.

Wherever Jude heard of free-stone work to be done, thither he went,
choosing by preference places remote from his old haunts and Sue's.
He laboured at a job, long or briefly, till it was finished; and
then moved on.

Two whole years and a half passed thus.  Sometimes he might have
been found shaping the mullions of a country mansion, sometimes
setting the parapet of a town-hall, sometimes ashlaring an hotel at
Sandbourne, sometimes a museum at Casterbridge, sometimes as far down
as Exonbury, sometimes at Stoke-Barehills.  Later still he was at
Kennetbridge, a thriving town not more than a dozen miles south of
Marygreen, this being his nearest approach to the village where he
was known; for he had a sensitive dread of being questioned as to his
life and fortunes by those who had been acquainted with him during
his ardent young manhood of study and promise, and his brief and
unhappy married life at that time.

At some of these places he would be detained for months, at others
only a few weeks.  His curious and sudden antipathy to ecclesiastical
work, both episcopal and noncomformist, which had risen in him when
suffering under a smarting sense of misconception, remained with him
in cold blood, less from any fear of renewed censure than from an
ultra-conscientiousness which would not allow him to seek a living
out of those who would disapprove of his ways; also, too, from a
sense of inconsistency between his former dogmas and his present
practice, hardly a shred of the beliefs with which he had first
gone up to Christminster now remaining with him.  He was mentally
approaching the position which Sue had occupied when he first met
her.

On a Saturday evening in May, nearly three years after Arabella's
recognition of Sue and himself at the agricultural show, some of
those who there encountered each other met again.

It was the spring fair at Kennetbridge, and, though this ancient
trade-meeting had much dwindled from its dimensions of former times,
the long straight street of the borough presented a lively scene
about midday.  At this hour a light trap, among other vehicles,
was driven into the town by the north road, and up to the door of
a temperance inn.  There alighted two women, one the driver, an
ordinary country person, the other a finely built figure in the deep
mourning of a widow.  Her sombre suit, of pronounced cut, caused
her to appear a little out of place in the medley and bustle of a
provincial fair.

"I will just find out where it is, Anny," said the widow-lady to her
companion, when the horse and cart had been taken by a man who came
forward: "and then I'll come back, and meet you here; and we'll go
in and have something to eat and drink.  I begin to feel quite a
sinking."

"With all my heart," said the other.  "Though I would sooner have
put up at the Chequers or The Jack.  You can't get much at these
temperance houses."

"Now, don't you give way to gluttonous desires, my child," said the
woman in weeds reprovingly.  "This is the proper place.  Very well:
we'll meet in half an hour, unless you come with me to find out where
the site of the new chapel is?"

"I don't care to.  You can tell me."

The companions then went their several ways, the one in crape walking
firmly along with a mien of disconnection from her miscellaneous
surroundings.  Making inquiries she came to a hoarding, within which
were excavations denoting the foundations of a building; and on
the boards without one or two large posters announcing that the
foundation-stone of the chapel about to be erected would be laid that
afternoon at three o'clock by a London preacher of great popularity
among his body.

Having ascertained thus much the immensely weeded widow retraced her
steps, and gave herself leisure to observe the movements of the fair.
By and by her attention was arrested by a little stall of cakes and
ginger-breads, standing between the more pretentious erections of
trestles and canvas.  It was covered with an immaculate cloth, and
tended by a young woman apparently unused to the business, she being
accompanied by a boy with an octogenarian face, who assisted her.

"Upon my--senses!" murmured the widow to herself.  "His wife Sue--if
she is so!"  She drew nearer to the stall.  "How do you do, Mrs.
Fawley?" she said blandly.

Sue changed colour and recognized Arabella through the crape veil.

"How are you, Mrs. Cartlett?" she said stiffly.  And then perceiving
Arabella's garb her voice grew sympathetic in spite of herself.
"What?--you have lost--"

"My poor husband.  Yes.  He died suddenly, six weeks ago, leaving me
none too well off, though he was a kind husband to me.  But whatever
profit there is in public-house keeping goes to them that brew the
liquors, and not to them that retail 'em...  And you, my little old
man!  You don't know me, I expect?"

"Yes, I do.  You be the woman I thought wer my mother for a bit, till
I found you wasn't," replied Father Time, who had learned to use the
Wessex tongue quite naturally by now.

"All right.  Never mind.  I am a friend."

"Juey," said Sue suddenly, "go down to the station platform with this
tray--there's another train coming in, I think."

When he was gone Arabella continued: "He'll never be a beauty, will
he, poor chap!  Does he know I am his mother really?"

"No. He thinks there is some mystery about his parentage--that's all.
Jude is going to tell him when he is a little older."

"But how do you come to be doing this?  I am surprised."

"It is only a temporary occupation--a fancy of ours while we are in a
difficulty."

"Then you are living with him still?"

"Yes."

"Married?"

"Of course."

"Any children?"

"Two."

"And another coming soon, I see."

Sue writhed under the hard and direct questioning, and her tender
little mouth began to quiver.

"Lord--I mean goodness gracious--what is there to cry about?  Some
folks would be proud enough!"

"It is not that I am ashamed--not as you think!  But it seems
such a terribly tragic thing to bring beings into the world--so
presumptuous--that I question my right to do it sometimes!"

"Take it easy, my dear...  But you don't tell me why you do such a
thing as this?  Jude used to be a proud sort of chap--above any
business almost, leave alone keeping a standing."

"Perhaps my husband has altered a little since then.  I am sure he
is not proud now!"  And Sue's lips quivered again.  "I am doing this
because he caught a chill early in the year while putting up some
stonework of a music-hall, at Quartershot, which he had to do in the
rain, the work having to be executed by a fixed day.  He is better
than he was; but it has been a long, weary time!  We have had an old
widow friend with us to help us through it; but she's leaving soon."

"Well, I am respectable too, thank God, and of a serious way of
thinking since my loss.  Why did you choose to sell gingerbreads?"

"That's a pure accident.  He was brought up to the baking business,
and it occurred to him to try his hand at these, which he can make
without coming out of doors.  We call them Christminster cakes.
They are a great success."

"I never saw any like 'em.  Why, they are windows and towers, and
pinnacles!  And upon my word they are very nice."  She had helped
herself, and was unceremoniously munching one of the cakes.

"Yes.  They are reminiscences of the Christminster Colleges.
Traceried windows, and cloisters, you see.  It was a whim of his
to do them in pastry."

"Still harping on Christminster--even in his cakes!" laughed
Arabella.  "Just like Jude.  A ruling passion.  What a queer fellow
he is, and always will be!"

Sue sighed, and she looked her distress at hearing him criticized.

"Don't you think he is?  Come now; you do, though you are so fond of
him!"

"Of course Christminster is a sort of fixed vision with him, which
I suppose he'll never be cured of believing in.  He still thinks it
a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is,
a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid
obsequiousness to tradition."

Arabella was quizzing Sue with more regard of how she was speaking
than of what she was saying.  "How odd to hear a woman selling
cakes talk like that!" she said.  "Why don't you go back to
school-keeping?"

She shook her head.  "They won't have me."

"Because of the divorce, I suppose?"

"That and other things.  And there is no reason to wish it.  We
gave up all ambition, and were never so happy in our lives till his
illness came."

"Where are you living?"

"I don't care to say."

"Here in Kennetbridge?"

Sue's manner showed Arabella that her random guess was right.

"Here comes the boy back again," continued Arabella.  "My boy and
Jude's!"

Sue's eyes darted a spark.  "You needn't throw that in my face!" she
cried.

"Very well--though I half-feel as if I should like to have him with
me! ...  But Lord, I don't want to take him from 'ee--ever I should
sin to speak so profane--though I should think you must have enough
of your own!  He's in very good hands, that I know; and I am not the
woman to find fault with what the Lord has ordained.  I've reached a
more resigned frame of mind."

"Indeed!  I wish I had been able to do so."

"You should try," replied the widow, from the serene heights of a
soul conscious not only of spiritual but of social superiority.
"I make no boast of my awakening, but I'm not what I was.  After
Cartlett's death I was passing the chapel in the street next ours,
and went into it for shelter from a shower of rain.  I felt a need
of some sort of support under my loss, and, as 'twas righter than
gin, I took to going there regular, and found it a great comfort.
But I've left London now, you know, and at present I am living at
Alfredston, with my friend Anny, to be near my own old country.  I'm
not come here to the fair to-day. There's to be the foundation-stone
of a new chapel laid this afternoon by a popular London preacher, and
I drove over with Anny.  Now I must go back to meet her."

Then Arabella wished Sue good-bye, and went on.

In the afternoon Sue and the other people bustling about Kennetbridge
fair could hear singing inside the placarded hoarding farther down
the street.  Those who peeped through the opening saw a crowd of
persons in broadcloth, with hymn-books in their hands, standing round
the excavations for the new chapel-walls. Arabella Cartlett and her
weeds stood among them.  She had a clear, powerful voice, which could
be distinctly heard with the rest, rising and falling to the tune,
her inflated bosom being also seen doing likewise.

It was two hours later on the same day that Anny and Mrs. Cartlett,
having had tea at the Temperance Hotel, started on their return
journey across the high and open country which stretches between
Kennetbridge and Alfredston.  Arabella was in a thoughtful mood; but
her thoughts were not of the new chapel, as Anny at first surmised.

"No--it is something else," at last said Arabella sullenly.  "I
came here to-day never thinking of anybody but poor Cartlett, or of
anything but spreading the Gospel by means of this new tabernacle
they've begun this afternoon.  But something has happened to turn my
mind another way quite.  Anny, I've heard of un again, and I've seen
HER!"

"Who?"

"I've heard of Jude, and I've seen his wife.  And ever since, do what
I will, and though I sung the hymns wi' all my strength, I have not
been able to help thinking about 'n; which I've no right to do as a
chapel member."

"Can't ye fix your mind upon what was said by the London preacher
to-day, and try to get rid of your wandering fancies that way?"

"I do.  But my wicked heart will ramble off in spite of myself!"

"Well--I know what it is to have a wanton mind o' my own, too!  If
you on'y knew what I do dream sometimes o' nights quite against my
wishes, you'd say I had my struggles!"  (Anny, too, had grown rather
serious of late, her lover having jilted her.)

"What shall I do about it?" urged Arabella morbidly.

"You could take a lock of your late-lost husband's hair, and have it
made into a mourning brooch, and look at it every hour of the day."

"I haven't a morsel!--and if I had 'twould be no good...  After all
that's said about the comforts of this religion, I wish I had Jude
back again!"

"You must fight valiant against the feeling, since he's another's.
And I've heard that another good thing for it, when it afflicts
volupshious widows, is to go to your husband's grave in the dusk of
evening, and stand a long while a-bowed down."

"Pooh!  I know as well as you what I should do; only I don't do it!"

They drove in silence along the straight road till they were within
the horizon of Marygreen, which lay not far to the left of their
route.  They came to the junction of the highway and the cross-lane
leading to that village, whose church-tower could be seen athwart the
hollow.  When they got yet farther on, and were passing the lonely
house in which Arabella and Jude had lived during the first months of
their marriage, and where the pig-killing had taken place, she could
control herself no longer.

"He's more mine than hers!" she burst out.  "What right has she to
him, I should like to know!  I'd take him from her if I could!"

"Fie, Abby!  And your husband only six weeks gone!  Pray against it!"

"Be damned if I do!  Feelings are feelings!  I won't be a creeping
hypocrite any longer--so there!"

Arabella had hastily drawn from her pocket a bundle of tracts which
she had brought with her to distribute at the fair, and of which she
had given away several.  As she spoke she flung the whole remainder
of the packet into the hedge.  "I've tried that sort o' physic and
have failed wi' it.  I must be as I was born!"

"Hush!  You be excited, dear!  Now you come along home quiet, and
have a cup of tea, and don't let us talk about un no more.  We won't
come out this road again, as it leads to where he is, because it
inflames 'ee so.  You'll be all right again soon."

Arabella did calm herself down by degrees; and they crossed the
ridge-way.  When they began to descend the long, straight hill, they
saw plodding along in front of them an elderly man of spare stature
and thoughtful gait.  In his hand he carried a basket; and there was
a touch of slovenliness in his attire, together with that indefinable
something in his whole appearance which suggested one who was his
own housekeeper, purveyor, confidant, and friend, through possessing
nobody else at all in the world to act in those capacities for him.
The remainder of the journey was down-hill, and guessing him to be
going to Alfredston they offered him a lift, which he accepted.

Arabella looked at him, and looked again, till at length she spoke.
"If I don't mistake I am talking to Mr. Phillotson?"

The wayfarer faced round and regarded her in turn.  "Yes; my name is
Phillotson," he said.  "But I don't recognize you, ma'am."

"I remember you well enough when you used to be schoolmaster out at
Marygreen, and I one of your scholars.  I used to walk up there from
Cresscombe every day, because we had only a mistress down at our
place, and you taught better.  But you wouldn't remember me as I
should you?--Arabella Donn."

He shook his head.  "No," he said politely, "I don't recall the name.
And I should hardly recognize in your present portly self the slim
school child no doubt you were then."

"Well, I always had plenty of flesh on my bones.  However, I am
staying down here with some friends at present.  You know, I suppose,
who I married?"

"No."

"Jude Fawley--also a scholar of yours--at least a night scholar--for
some little time, I think?  And known to you afterwards, if I am not
mistaken."

"Dear me, dear me," said Phillotson, starting out of his stiffness.
"YOU Fawley's wife?  To be sure--he had a wife!  And he--I
understood--"

"Divorced her--as you did yours--perhaps for better reasons."

"Indeed?"

"Well--he med have been right in doing it--right for both; for I soon
married again, and all went pretty straight till my husband died
lately.  But you--you were decidedly wrong!"

"No," said Phillotson, with sudden testiness.  "I would rather not
talk of this, but--I am convinced I did only what was right, and
just, and moral.  I have suffered for my act and opinions, but I hold
to them; though her loss was a loss to me in more ways than one!"

"You lost your school and good income through her, did you not?"

"I don't care to talk of it.  I have recently come back here--to
Marygreen. I mean."

"You are keeping the school there again, just as formerly?"

The pressure of a sadness that would out unsealed him.  "I am there,"
he replied.  "Just as formerly, no.  Merely on sufferance.  It was
a last resource--a small thing to return to after my move upwards,
and my long indulged hopes--a returning to zero, with all its
humiliations.  But it is a refuge.  I like the seclusion of the
place, and the vicar having known me before my so-called eccentric
conduct towards my wife had ruined my reputation as a schoolmaster,
he accepted my services when all other schools were closed against
me.  However, although I take fifty pounds a year here after taking
above two hundred elsewhere, I prefer it to running the risk of
having my old domestic experiences raked up against me, as I should
do if I tried to make a move."

"Right you are.  A contented mind is a continual feast.  She has done
no better."

"She is not doing well, you mean?"

"I met her by accident at Kennetbridge this very day, and she is
anything but thriving.  Her husband is ill, and she anxious.  You
made a fool of a mistake about her, I tell 'ee again, and the harm
you did yourself by dirting your own nest serves you right, excusing
the liberty."

"How?"

"She was innocent."

"But nonsense!  They did not even defend the case!"

"That was because they didn't care to.  She was quite innocent of
what obtained you your freedom, at the time you obtained it.  I saw
her just afterwards, and proved it to myself completely by talking to
her."

Phillotson grasped the edge of the spring-cart, and appeared to be
much stressed and worried by the information.  "Still--she wanted to
go," he said.

"Yes.  But you shouldn't have let her.  That's the only way with
these fanciful women that chaw high--innocent or guilty.  She'd have
come round in time.  We all do!  Custom does it!  It's all the same
in the end!  However, I think she's fond of her man still--whatever
he med be of her.  You were too quick about her.  _I_ shouldn't
have let her go!  I should have kept her chained on--her spirit for
kicking would have been broke soon enough!  There's nothing like
bondage and a stone-deaf taskmaster for taming us women.  Besides,
you've got the laws on your side.  Moses knew.  Don't you call to
mind what he says?"

"Not for the moment, ma'am, I regret to say."

"Call yourself a schoolmaster!  I used to think o't when they read
it in church, and I was carrying on a bit.  'Then shall the man be
guiltless; but the woman shall bear her iniquity.'  Damn rough on us
women; but we must grin and put up wi' it!  Haw haw!  Well; she's got
her deserts now."

"Yes," said Phillotson, with biting sadness.  "Cruelty is the law
pervading all nature and society; and we can't get out of it if we
would!"

"Well--don't you forget to try it next time, old man."

"I cannot answer you, madam.  I have never known much of womankind."

They had now reached the low levels bordering Alfredston, and passing
through the outskirts approached a mill, to which Phillotson said his
errand led him; whereupon they drew up, and he alighted, bidding them
good-night in a preoccupied mood.

In the meantime Sue, though remarkably successful in her cake-selling
experiment at Kennetbridge fair, had lost the temporary brightness
which had begun to sit upon her sadness on account of that success.
When all her "Christminster" cakes had been disposed of she took
upon her arm the empty basket, and the cloth which had covered the
standing she had hired, and giving the other things to the boy left
the street with him.  They followed a lane to a distance of half a
mile, till they met an old woman carrying a child in short clothes,
and leading a toddler in the other hand.

Sue kissed the children, and said, "How is he now?"

"Still better!" returned Mrs. Edlin cheerfully.  "Before you are
upstairs again your husband will be well enough--don't 'ee trouble."

They turned, and came to some old, dun-tiled cottages with gardens
and fruit-trees.  Into one of these they entered by lifting the latch
without knocking, and were at once in the general living-room.  Here
they greeted Jude, who was sitting in an arm-chair, the increased
delicacy of his normally delicate features, and the childishly
expectant look in his eyes, being alone sufficient to show that he
had been passing through a severe illness.

"What--you have sold them all?" he said, a gleam of interest lighting
up his face.

"Yes.  Arcades, gables, east windows and all."  She told him the
pecuniary results, and then hesitated.  At last, when they were left
alone, she informed him of the unexpected meeting with Arabella, and
the latter's widowhood.

Jude was discomposed.  "What--is she living here?" he said.

"No; at Alfredston," said Sue.

Jude's countenance remained clouded.  "I thought I had better tell
you?" she continued, kissing him anxiously.

"Yes...  Dear me!  Arabella not in the depths of London, but down
here!  It is only a little over a dozen miles across the country to
Alfredston.  What is she doing there?"

She told him all she knew.  "She has taken to chapel-going," Sue
added; "and talks accordingly."

"Well," said Jude, "perhaps it is for the best that we have almost
decided to move on.  I feel much better to-day, and shall be well
enough to leave in a week or two.  Then Mrs. Edlin can go home
again--dear faithful old soul--the only friend we have in the world!"

"Where do you think to go to?"  Sue asked, a troublousness in her
tones.

Then Jude confessed what was in his mind.  He said it would surprise
her, perhaps, after his having resolutely avoided all the old places
for so long.  But one thing and another had made him think a great
deal of Christminster lately, and, if she didn't mind, he would like
to go back there.  Why should they care if they were known?  It was
oversensitive of them to mind so much.  They could go on selling
cakes there, for that matter, if he couldn't work.  He had no sense
of shame at mere poverty; and perhaps he would be as strong as ever
soon, and able to set up stone-cutting for himself there.

"Why should you care so much for Christminster?" she said pensively.
"Christminster cares nothing for you, poor dear!"

"Well, I do, I can't help it.  I love the place--although I know
how it hates all men like me--the so-called self-taught--how it
scorns our laboured acquisitions, when it should be the first
to respect them; how it sneers at our false quantities and
mispronunciations, when it should say, I see you want help, my poor
friend! ...  Nevertheless, it is the centre of the universe to me,
because of my early dream: and nothing can alter it.  Perhaps it will
soon wake up, and be generous.  I pray so! ...  I should like to go
back to live there--perhaps to die there!  In two or three weeks I
might, I think.  It will then be June, and I should like to be there
by a particular day."

His hope that he was recovering proved so far well grounded that
in three weeks they had arrived in the city of many memories; were
actually treading its pavements, receiving the reflection of the
sunshine from its wasting walls.

Part Sixth

AT CHRISTMINSTER AGAIN

   "...  And she humbled her body greatly, and all the places
    of her joy she filled with her torn hair."--ESTHER (Apoc.).

      "There are two who decline, a woman and I,
      And enjoy our death in the darkness here."
                               --R. BROWNING.

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

completion: Two and a half years pass, and Jude and Sue are living at Kennetbridge, not far from Marygreen, Jude having worked in many places over the years and still unchanged in his refusal to work on churches. During the time of the spring fair, Arabella comes with her friend Anny for the dedication of a new chapel and encounters Sue, who is selling cakes and gingerbreads at a stall. Arabella tells Sue her husband is dead and questions her about her life. She says that she is married, that she has two children , that Jude has lost his pride, is ill, and bakes cakes because he can do the work indoors. The fact that the cakes are in shapes reminiscent of buildings at Christminster causes both women to agree that Jude still thinks of the city as his ideal. Arabella tells Sue that since her husband's death she has found religion, and she has come from Alfredston, where she lives with her friend, for the dedication. On her way home from Kennetbridge Arabella tells her friend Anny that she wishes she had Jude back, that he is more hers than Sue's, and that she won't be a hypocrite any longer about religion. Along the way, they meet Phillotson, now teaching at Marygreen again, and Arabella identifies herself, this being the first time they have met since Arabella was his pupil. Telling him where Sue now is, Arabella criticizes Phillotson for letting her go, pointing out that Sue was never intimate with Jude before the divorce. She lectures him on how he should treat a wife. In Kennetbridge, when Sue returns to their lodgings, she tells Jude she has sold all the cakes and has seen Arabella. Jude takes Arabella's living near as a good enough reason for moving on and to Sue's surprise says he wants to return to Christminster, which he loves even though he knows it despises men like him. Accordingly, in a few weeks they go.