prompt:
Chapter: 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: While returning to Alfredston with her friend Anny, Arabella confesses that seeing Sue has revived her interest in Jude. She cannot bear the thought of his being with Sue. She throws her religious pamphlets into a hedge, saying she does not want to be a hypocrite. On the way they overtake an elderly man who is shabbily dressed. It is none other than Phillotson. Arabella recognizes him and learns that he is now again a schoolmaster at Marygreen, but at a reduced salary. Phillotson has suffered because of Sue. Arabella is now out to make mischief, and tells Phillotson about Jude and Sue's distressing condition. She points out that he should not have allowed the divorce since Sue was not intimate with Jude at that time. Phillotson, though surprised, still believes his decision was right and just. Arabella tells him that he should have used a firm hand with Sue and bullied her into submission. In the meantime Sue returns home to Jude and tells him of her encounter with Arabella. Jude is disturbed and feels it is best to move on to another place; Christminster is considered as the best option. It still holds an attraction for him, and within three weeks they arrive at the city of his dreams.


prompt:
Chapter: On their arrival the station was lively with straw-hatted young men,
welcoming young girls who bore a remarkable family likeness to their
welcomers, and who were dressed up in the brightest and lightest of
raiment.

"The place seems gay," said Sue.  "Why--it is Remembrance
Day!--Jude--how sly of you--you came to-day on purpose!"

"Yes," said Jude quietly, as he took charge of the small child, and
told Arabella's boy to keep close to them, Sue attending to their own
eldest.  "I thought we might as well come to-day as on any other."

"But I am afraid it will depress you!" she said, looking anxiously at
him up and down.

"Oh, I mustn't let it interfere with our business; and we have a good
deal to do before we shall be settled here.  The first thing is
lodgings."

Having left their luggage and his tools at the station they proceeded
on foot up the familiar street, the holiday people all drifting in
the same direction.  Reaching the Fourways they were about to turn
off to where accommodation was likely to be found when, looking at
the clock and the hurrying crowd, Jude said: "Let us go and see the
procession, and never mind the lodgings just now.  We can get them
afterwards."

"Oughtn't we to get a house over our heads first?" she asked.

But his soul seemed full of the anniversary, and together they went
down Chief Street, their smallest child in Jude's arms, Sue leading
her little girl, and Arabella's boy walking thoughtfully and silently
beside them.  Crowds of pretty sisters in airy costumes, and meekly
ignorant parents who had known no college in their youth, were under
convoy in the same direction by brothers and sons bearing the opinion
written large on them that no properly qualified human beings had
lived on earth till they came to grace it here and now.

"My failure is reflected on me by every one of those young
fellows," said Jude.  "A lesson on presumption is awaiting me
to-day!--Humiliation Day for me! ...  If you, my dear darling, hadn't
come to my rescue, I should have gone to the dogs with despair!"

She saw from his face that he was getting into one of his
tempestuous, self-harrowing moods.  "It would have been better if we
had gone at once about our own affairs, dear," she answered.  "I am
sure this sight will awaken old sorrows in you, and do no good!"

"Well--we are near; we will see it now," said he.

They turned in on the left by the church with the Italian porch,
whose helical columns were heavily draped with creepers, and pursued
the lane till there arose on Jude's sight the circular theatre with
that well-known lantern above it, which stood in his mind as the sad
symbol of his abandoned hopes, for it was from that outlook that he
had finally surveyed the City of Colleges on the afternoon of his
great meditation, which convinced him at last of the futility of his
attempt to be a son of the university.

To-day, in the open space stretching between this building and the
nearest college, stood a crowd of expectant people.  A passage was
kept clear through their midst by two barriers of timber, extending
from the door of the college to the door of the large building
between it and the theatre.

"Here is the place--they are just going to pass!" cried Jude in
sudden excitement.  And pushing his way to the front he took up a
position close to the barrier, still hugging the youngest child in
his arms, while Sue and the others kept immediately behind him.
The crowd filled in at their back, and fell to talking, joking, and
laughing as carriage after carriage drew up at the lower door of
the college, and solemn stately figures in blood-red robes began to
alight.  The sky had grown overcast and livid, and thunder rumbled
now and then.

Father Time shuddered.  "It do seem like the Judgment Day!" he
whispered.

"They are only learned Doctors," said Sue.

While they waited big drops of rain fell on their heads and
shoulders, and the delay grew tedious.  Sue again wished not to stay.

"They won't be long now," said Jude, without turning his head.

But the procession did not come forth, and somebody in the crowd, to
pass the time, looked at the facade of the nearest college, and said
he wondered what was meant by the Latin inscription in its midst.
Jude, who stood near the inquirer, explained it, and finding that
the people all round him were listening with interest, went on to
describe the carving of the frieze (which he had studied years
before), and to criticize some details of masonry in other college
fronts about the city.

The idle crowd, including the two policemen at the doors, stared like
the Lycaonians at Paul, for Jude was apt to get too enthusiastic over
any subject in hand, and they seemed to wonder how the stranger
should know more about the buildings of their town than they
themselves did; till one of them said: "Why, I know that man; he used
to work here years ago--Jude Fawley, that's his name!  Don't you mind
he used to be nicknamed Tutor of St. Slums, d'ye mind?--because he
aimed at that line o' business?  He's married, I suppose, then, and
that's his child he's carrying.  Taylor would know him, as he knows
everybody."

The speaker was a man named Jack Stagg, with whom Jude had formerly
worked in repairing the college masonries; Tinker Taylor was seen to
be standing near.  Having his attention called the latter cried
across the barriers to Jude: "You've honoured us by coming back
again, my friend!"

Jude nodded.

"An' you don't seem to have done any great things for yourself by
going away?"

Jude assented to this also.

"Except found more mouths to fill!"  This came in a new voice, and
Jude recognized its owner to be Uncle Joe, another mason whom he had
known.

Jude replied good-humouredly that he could not dispute it; and from
remark to remark something like a general conversation arose between
him and the crowd of idlers, during which Tinker Taylor asked Jude if
he remembered the Apostles' Creed in Latin still, and the night of
the challenge in the public house.

"But Fortune didn't lie that way?" threw in Joe.  "Yer powers wasn't
enough to carry 'ee through?"

"Don't answer them any more!" entreated Sue.

"I don't think I like Christminster!" murmured little Time
mournfully, as he stood submerged and invisible in the crowd.

But finding himself the centre of curiosity, quizzing, and comment,
Jude was not inclined to shrink from open declarations of what he
had no great reason to be ashamed of; and in a little while was
stimulated to say in a loud voice to the listening throng generally:

"It is a difficult question, my friends, for any young man--that
question I had to grapple with, and which thousands are weighing
at the present moment in these uprising times--whether to follow
uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his
aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and
re-shape his course accordingly.  I tried to do the latter, and I
failed.  But I don't admit that my failure proved my view to be a
wrong one, or that my success would have made it a right one; though
that's how we appraise such attempts nowadays--I mean, not by their
essential soundness, but by their accidental outcomes.  If I had
ended by becoming like one of these gentlemen in red and black that
we saw dropping in here by now, everybody would have said: 'See how
wise that young man was, to follow the bent of his nature!'  But
having ended no better than I began they say: 'See what a fool that
fellow was in following a freak of his fancy!'

"However it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be
beaten.  It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do
in one; and my impulses--affections--vices perhaps they should be
called--were too strong not to hamper a man without advantages; who
should be as cold-blooded as a fish and as selfish as a pig to have a
really good chance of being one of his country's worthies.  You may
ridicule me--I am quite willing that you should--I am a fit subject,
no doubt.  But I think if you knew what I have gone through these
last few years you would rather pity me.  And if they knew"--he
nodded towards the college at which the dons were severally
arriving--"it is just possible they would do the same."

"He do look ill and worn-out, it is true!" said a woman.

Sue's face grew more emotional; but though she stood close to Jude
she was screened.

"I may do some good before I am dead--be a sort of success as a
frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral
story," continued Jude, beginning to grow bitter, though he had
opened serenely enough.  "I was, perhaps, after all, a paltry victim
to the spirit of mental and social restlessness that makes so many
unhappy in these days!"

"Don't tell them that!" whispered Sue with tears, at perceiving
Jude's state of mind.  "You weren't that.  You struggled nobly to
acquire knowledge, and only the meanest souls in the world would
blame you!"

Jude shifted the child into a more easy position on his arm, and
concluded: "And what I appear, a sick and poor man, is not the worst
of me.  I am in a chaos of principles--groping in the dark--acting by
instinct and not after example.  Eight or nine years ago when I came
here first, I had a neat stock of fixed opinions, but they dropped
away one by one; and the further I get the less sure I am.  I doubt
if I have anything more for my present rule of life than following
inclinations which do me and nobody else any harm, and actually give
pleasure to those I love best.  There, gentlemen, since you wanted to
know how I was getting on, I have told you.  Much good may it do you!
I cannot explain further here.  I perceive there is something wrong
somewhere in our social formulas: what it is can only be discovered
by men or women with greater insight than mine--if, indeed, they ever
discover it--at least in our time.  'For who knoweth what is good for
man in this life?--and who can tell a man what shall be after him
under the sun?'"

"Hear, hear," said the populace.

"Well preached!" said Tinker Taylor.  And privately to his
neighbours: "Why, one of them jobbing pa'sons swarming about here,
that takes the services when our head reverends want a holiday,
wouldn't ha' discoursed such doctrine for less than a guinea down.
Hey?  I'll take my oath not one o' 'em would!  And then he must have
had it wrote down for 'n.  And this only a working-man!"

As a sort of objective commentary on Jude's remarks there drove up
at this moment with a belated Doctor, robed and panting, a cab whose
horse failed to stop at the exact point required for setting down the
hirer, who jumped out and entered the door.  The driver, alighting,
began to kick the animal in the belly.

"If that can be done," said Jude, "at college gates in the most
religious and educational city in the world, what shall we say as to
how far we've got?"

"Order!" said one of the policemen, who had been engaged with a
comrade in opening the large doors opposite the college.  "Keep yer
tongue quiet, my man, while the procession passes."  The rain came on
more heavily, and all who had umbrellas opened them.  Jude was not
one of these, and Sue only possessed a small one, half sunshade.  She
had grown pale, though Jude did not notice it then.

"Let us go on, dear," she whispered, endeavouring to shelter him.
"We haven't any lodgings yet, remember, and all our things are at the
station; and you are by no means well yet.  I am afraid this wet will
hurt you!"

"They are coming now.  Just a moment, and I'll go!" said he.

A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd the
windows around, and the procession of heads of houses and new Doctors
emerged, their red and black gowned forms passing across the field of
Jude's vision like inaccessible planets across an object-glass.

As they went their names were called by knowing informants, and when
they reached the old round theatre of Wren a cheer rose high.

"Let's go that way!" cried Jude, and though it now rained steadily
he seemed not to know it, and took them round to the theatre.  Here
they stood upon the straw that was laid to drown the discordant noise
of wheels, where the quaint and frost-eaten stone busts encircling
the building looked with pallid grimness on the proceedings, and in
particular at the bedraggled Jude, Sue, and their children, as at
ludicrous persons who had no business there.

"I wish I could get in!" he said to her fervidly.  "Listen--I may
catch a few words of the Latin speech by staying here; the windows
are open."

However, beyond the peals of the organ, and the shouts and hurrahs
between each piece of oratory, Jude's standing in the wet did not
bring much Latin to his intelligence more than, now and then, a
sonorous word in _um_ or _ibus_.

"Well--I'm an outsider to the end of my days!" he sighed after a
while.  "Now I'll go, my patient Sue.  How good of you to wait in the
rain all this time--to gratify my infatuation!  I'll never care any
more about the infernal cursed place, upon my soul I won't!  But what
made you tremble so when we were at the barrier?  And how pale you
are, Sue!"

"I saw Richard amongst the people on the other side."

"Ah--did you!"

"He is evidently come up to Jerusalem to see the festival like the
rest of us: and on that account is probably living not so very far
away.  He had the same hankering for the university that you had, in
a milder form.  I don't think he saw me, though he must have heard
you speaking to the crowd.  But he seemed not to notice."

"Well--suppose he did.  Your mind is free from worries about him now,
my Sue?"

"Yes, I suppose so.  But I am weak.  Although I know it is all right
with our plans, I felt a curious dread of him; an awe, or terror, of
conventions I don't believe in.  It comes over me at times like a
sort of creeping paralysis, and makes me so sad!"

"You are getting tired, Sue.  Oh--I forgot, darling!  Yes, we'll go
on at once."

They started in quest of the lodging, and at last found something
that seemed to promise well, in Mildew Lane--a spot which to Jude was
irresistible--though to Sue it was not so fascinating--a narrow lane
close to the back of a college, but having no communication with
it.  The little houses were darkened to gloom by the high collegiate
buildings, within which life was so far removed from that of the
people in the lane as if it had been on opposite sides of the globe;
yet only a thickness of wall divided them.  Two or three of the
houses had notices of rooms to let, and the newcomers knocked at the
door of one, which a woman opened.

"Ah--listen!" said Jude suddenly, instead of addressing her.

"What?"

"Why the bells--what church can that be?  The tones are familiar."

Another peal of bells had begun to sound out at some distance off.

"I don't know!" said the landlady tartly.  "Did you knock to ask
that?"

"No; for lodgings," said Jude, coming to himself.

The householder scrutinized Sue's figure a moment.  "We haven't any
to let," said she, shutting the door.

Jude looked discomfited, and the boy distressed.  "Now, Jude," said
Sue, "let me try.  You don't know the way."

They found a second place hard by; but here the occupier, observing
not only Sue, but the boy and the small children, said civilly, "I am
sorry to say we don't let where there are children"; and also closed
the door.

The small child squared its mouth and cried silently, with an
instinct that trouble loomed.  The boy sighed.  "I don't like
Christminster!" he said.  "Are the great old houses gaols?"

"No; colleges," said Jude; "which perhaps you'll study in some day."

"I'd rather not!" the boy rejoined.

"Now we'll try again," said Sue.  "I'll pull my cloak more round
me...  Leaving Kennetbridge for this place is like coming from
Caiaphas to Pilate! ...  How do I look now, dear?"

"Nobody would notice it now," said Jude.

There was one other house, and they tried a third time.  The woman
here was more amiable; but she had little room to spare, and could
only agree to take in Sue and the children if her husband could go
elsewhere.  This arrangement they perforce adopted, in the stress
from delaying their search till so late.  They came to terms with
her, though her price was rather high for their pockets.  But they
could not afford to be critical till Jude had time to get a more
permanent abode; and in this house Sue took possession of a back room
on the second floor with an inner closet-room for the children.  Jude
stayed and had a cup of tea; and was pleased to find that the window
commanded the back of another of the colleges.  Kissing all four he
went to get a few necessaries and look for lodgings for himself.

When he was gone the landlady came up to talk a little with Sue, and
gather something of the circumstances of the family she had taken in.
Sue had not the art of prevarication, and, after admitting several
facts as to their late difficulties and wanderings, she was startled
by the landlady saying suddenly:

"Are you really a married woman?"

Sue hesitated; and then impulsively told the woman that her husband
and herself had each been unhappy in their first marriages, after
which, terrified at the thought of a second irrevocable union, and
lest the conditions of the contract should kill their love, yet
wishing to be together, they had literally not found the courage
to repeat it, though they had attempted it two or three times.
Therefore, though in her own sense of the words she was a married
woman, in the landlady's sense she was not.

The housewife looked embarrassed, and went downstairs.  Sue sat by
the window in a reverie, watching the rain.  Her quiet was broken by
the noise of someone entering the house, and then the voices of a
man and woman in conversation in the passage below.  The landlady's
husband had arrived, and she was explaining to him the incoming of
the lodgers during his absence.

His voice rose in sudden anger.  "Now who wants such a woman here?
and perhaps a confinement! ...  Besides, didn't I say I wouldn't have
children?  The hall and stairs fresh painted, to be kicked about by
them!  You must have known all was not straight with 'em--coming like
that.  Taking in a family when I said a single man."

The wife expostulated, but, as it seemed, the husband insisted on
his point; for presently a tap came to Sue's door, and the woman
appeared.

"I am sorry to tell you, ma'am," she said, "that I can't let you have
the room for the week after all.  My husband objects; and therefore
I must ask you to go.  I don't mind your staying over to-night, as
it is getting late in the afternoon; but I shall be glad if you can
leave early in the morning."

Though she knew that she was entitled to the lodging for a week, Sue
did not wish to create a disturbance between the wife and husband,
and she said she would leave as requested.  When the landlady had
gone Sue looked out of the window again.  Finding that the rain had
ceased she proposed to the boy that, after putting the little ones
to bed, they should go out and search about for another place, and
bespeak it for the morrow, so as not to be so hard-driven then as
they had been that day.

Therefore, instead of unpacking her boxes, which had just been sent
on from the station by Jude, they sallied out into the damp though
not unpleasant streets, Sue resolving not to disturb her husband
with the news of her notice to quit while he was perhaps worried
in obtaining a lodging for himself.  In the company of the boy she
wandered into this street and into that; but though she tried a dozen
different houses she fared far worse alone than she had fared in
Jude's company, and could get nobody to promise her a room for the
following day.  Every householder looked askance at such a woman and
child inquiring for accommodation in the gloom.

"I ought not to be born, ought I?" said the boy with misgiving.

Thoroughly tired at last Sue returned to the place where she was
not welcome, but where at least she had temporary shelter.  In her
absence Jude had left his address; but knowing how weak he still was
she adhered to her determination not to disturb him till the next
day.

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

completion: Over two years have passed. Jude and Sue lead a wandering life, stopping wherever Jude can find work as a mason. However, he refuses to do any church work. At the little town of Kennetbridge, Arabella and Anny arrive one day. Arabella is now widowed and is in mourning and has come to Kennetbridge to see the laying of a foundation stone of a new chapel. She claims that she has now turned to religion for consolation. She suddenly spots Sue and Little Father Time selling cakes and gingerbread at a stall at the fair. She questions Sue and learns that Jude was very ill that winter, and they have therefore tried their hand at baking in an attempt to earn a living. Sue now has two children of her own and is expecting a third. The cakes Jude makes are shaped like Christminster colleges, with towers and pinnacles and traceried windows, indicating that Jude still has a passion for Christminster.


prompt:
Chapter: Sue sat looking at the bare floor of the room, the house being little
more than an old intramural cottage, and then she regarded the scene
outside the uncurtained window.  At some distance opposite, the outer
walls of Sarcophagus College--silent, black, and windowless--threw
their four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little
room she occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by
day.  The outlines of Rubric College also were discernible beyond the
other, and the tower of a third farther off still.  She thought of
the strange operation of a simple-minded man's ruling passion, that
it should have led Jude, who loved her and the children so tenderly,
to place them here in this depressing purlieu, because he was still
haunted by his dream.  Even now he did not distinctly hear the
freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed to his
desire.

The failure to find another lodging, and the lack of room in this
house for his father, had made a deep impression on the boy--a
brooding undemonstrative horror seemed to have seized him.  The
silence was broken by his saying: "Mother, WHAT shall we do
to-morrow!"

"I don't know!" said Sue despondently.  "I am afraid this will
trouble your father."

"I wish Father was quite well, and there had been room for him!
Then it wouldn't matter so much!  Poor Father!"

"It wouldn't!"

"Can I do anything?"

"No!  All is trouble, adversity, and suffering!"

"Father went away to give us children room, didn't he?"

"Partly."

"It would be better to be out o' the world than in it, wouldn't it?"

"It would almost, dear."

"'Tis because of us children, too, isn't it, that you can't get a
good lodging?"

"Well--people do object to children sometimes."

"Then if children make so much trouble, why do people have 'em?"

"Oh--because it is a law of nature."

"But we don't ask to be born?"

"No indeed."

"And what makes it worse with me is that you are not my real mother,
and you needn't have had me unless you liked.  I oughtn't to have
come to 'ee--that's the real truth!  I troubled 'em in Australia,
and I trouble folk here.  I wish I hadn't been born!"

"You couldn't help it, my dear."

"I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they
should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not
allowed to grow big and walk about!"

Sue did not reply.  She was doubtfully pondering how to treat this
too reflective child.

She at last concluded that, so far as circumstances permitted, she
would be honest and candid with one who entered into her difficulties
like an aged friend.

"There is going to be another in our family soon," she hesitatingly
remarked.

"How?"

"There is going to be another baby."

"What!"  The boy jumped up wildly.  "Oh God, Mother, you've never
a-sent for another; and such trouble with what you've got!"

"Yes, I have, I am sorry to say!" murmured Sue, her eyes glistening
with suspended tears.

The boy burst out weeping.  "Oh you don't care, you don't care!" he
cried in bitter reproach.  "How EVER could you, Mother, be so wicked
and cruel as this, when you needn't have done it till we was better
off, and Father well!  To bring us all into MORE trouble!  No room
for us, and Father a-forced to go away, and we turned out to-morrow;
and yet you be going to have another of us soon! ...  'Tis done o'
purpose!--'tis--'tis!"  He walked up and down sobbing.

"Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!" she pleaded, her bosom heaving
now as much as the boy's. "I can't explain--I will when you are
older.  It does seem--as if I had done it on purpose, now we are in
these difficulties!  I can't explain, dear!  But it--is not quite on
purpose--I can't help it!"

"Yes it is--it must be!  For nobody would interfere with us, like
that, unless you agreed!  I won't forgive you, ever, ever!  I'll
never believe you care for me, or Father, or any of us any more!"

He got up, and went away into the closet adjoining her room, in which
a bed had been spread on the floor.  There she heard him say: "If we
children was gone there'd be no trouble at all!"

"Don't think that, dear," she cried, rather peremptorily.  "But go to
sleep!"

The following morning she awoke at a little past six, and decided
to get up and run across before breakfast to the inn which Jude had
informed her to be his quarters, to tell him what had happened before
he went out.  She arose softly, to avoid disturbing the children,
who, as she knew, must be fatigued by their exertions of yesterday.

She found Jude at breakfast in the obscure tavern he had chosen as a
counterpoise to the expense of her lodging: and she explained to him
her homelessness.  He had been so anxious about her all night, he
said.  Somehow, now it was morning, the request to leave the lodgings
did not seem such a depressing incident as it had seemed the night
before, nor did even her failure to find another place affect her so
deeply as at first.  Jude agreed with her that it would not be worth
while to insist upon her right to stay a week, but to take immediate
steps for removal.

"You must all come to this inn for a day or two," he said.  "It is
a rough place, and it will not be so nice for the children, but we
shall have more time to look round.  There are plenty of lodgings in
the suburbs--in my old quarter of Beersheba.  Have breakfast with me
now you are here, my bird.  You are sure you are well?  There will
be plenty of time to get back and prepare the children's meal before
they wake.  In fact, I'll go with you."

She joined Jude in a hasty meal, and in a quarter of an hour they
started together, resolving to clear out from Sue's too respectable
lodging immediately.  On reaching the place and going upstairs she
found that all was quiet in the children's room, and called to the
landlady in timorous tones to please bring up the tea-kettle and
something for their breakfast.  This was perfunctorily done, and
producing a couple of eggs which she had brought with her she put
them into the boiling kettle, and summoned Jude to watch them for the
youngsters, while she went to call them, it being now about half-past
eight o'clock.

Jude stood bending over the kettle, with his watch in his hand,
timing the eggs, so that his back was turned to the little inner
chamber where the children lay.  A shriek from Sue suddenly caused
him to start round.  He saw that the door of the room, or rather
closet--which had seemed to go heavily upon its hinges as she pushed
it back--was open, and that Sue had sunk to the floor just within it.
Hastening forward to pick her up he turned his eyes to the little
bed spread on the boards; no children were there.  He looked in
bewilderment round the room.  At the back of the door were fixed
two hooks for hanging garments, and from these the forms of the two
youngest children were suspended, by a piece of box-cord round each
of their necks, while from a nail a few yards off the body of little
Jude was hanging in a similar manner.  An overturned chair was near
the elder boy, and his glazed eyes were slanted into the room; but
those of the girl and the baby boy were closed.

Half-paralyzed by the strange and consummate horror of the scene, he
let Sue lie, cut the cords with his pocket-knife and threw the three
children on the bed; but the feel of their bodies in the momentary
handling seemed to say that they were dead.  He caught up Sue, who
was in fainting fits, and put her on the bed in the other room, after
which he breathlessly summoned the landlady and ran out for a doctor.

When he got back Sue had come to herself, and the two helpless
women, bending over the children in wild efforts to restore them,
and the triplet of little corpses, formed a sight which overthrew
his self-command.  The nearest surgeon came in, but, as Jude had
inferred, his presence was superfluous.  The children were past
saving, for though their bodies were still barely cold it was
conjectured that they had been hanging more than an hour.  The
probability held by the parents later on, when they were able to
reason on the case, was that the elder boy, on waking, looked into
the outer room for Sue, and, finding her absent, was thrown into a
fit of aggravated despondency that the events and information of the
evening before had induced in his morbid temperament.  Moreover a
piece of paper was found upon the floor, on which was written, in
the boy's hand, with the bit of lead pencil that he carried:

   _Done because we are too menny._

At sight of this Sue's nerves utterly gave way, an awful conviction
that her discourse with the boy had been the main cause of the
tragedy, throwing her into a convulsive agony which knew no
abatement.  They carried her away against her wish to a room on the
lower floor; and there she lay, her slight figure shaken with her
gasps, and her eyes staring at the ceiling, the woman of the house
vainly trying to soothe her.

They could hear from this chamber the people moving about above, and
she implored to be allowed to go back, and was only kept from doing
so by the assurance that, if there were any hope, her presence might
do harm, and the reminder that it was necessary to take care of
herself lest she should endanger a coming life.  Her inquiries were
incessant, and at last Jude came down and told her there was no hope.
As soon as she could speak she informed him what she had said to the
boy, and how she thought herself the cause of this.

"No," said Jude.  "It was in his nature to do it.  The Doctor says
there are such boys springing up amongst us--boys of a sort unknown
in the last generation--the outcome of new views of life.  They seem
to see all its terrors before they are old enough to have staying
power to resist them.  He says it is the beginning of the coming
universal wish not to live.  He's an advanced man, the Doctor: but
he can give no consolation to--"

Jude had kept back his own grief on account of her; but he now
broke down; and this stimulated Sue to efforts of sympathy which in
some degree distracted her from her poignant self-reproach.  When
everybody was gone, she was allowed to see the children.

The boy's face expressed the whole tale of their situation.  On
that little shape had converged all the inauspiciousness and shadow
which had darkened the first union of Jude, and all the accidents,
mistakes, fears, errors of the last.  He was their nodal point, their
focus, their expression in a single term.  For the rashness of those
parents he had groaned, for their ill assortment he had quaked, and
for the misfortunes of these he had died.

When the house was silent, and they could do nothing but await the
coroner's inquest, a subdued, large, low voice spread into the air of
the room from behind the heavy walls at the back.

"What is it?" said Sue, her spasmodic breathing suspended.

"The organ of the college chapel.  The organist practising I suppose.
It's the anthem from the seventy-third Psalm; 'Truly God is loving
unto Israel.'"

She sobbed again.  "Oh, oh my babies!  They had done no harm!  Why
should they have been taken away, and not I!"

There was another stillness--broken at last by two persons in
conversation somewhere without.

"They are talking about us, no doubt!" moaned Sue.  "'We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!'"

Jude listened--"No--they are not talking of us," he said.  "They
are two clergymen of different views, arguing about the eastward
position.  Good God--the eastward position, and all creation
groaning!"

Then another silence, till she was seized with another uncontrollable
fit of grief.  "There is something external to us which says, 'You
shan't!'  First it said, 'You shan't learn!'  Then it said, 'You
shan't labour!'  Now it says, 'You shan't love!'"

He tried to soothe her by saying, "That's bitter of you, darling."

"But it's true!"

Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room.  The baby's
frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time
of his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain
have got them out of her sight.  But whenever he touched them she
implored him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the
woman of the house when she also attempted to put them away.

Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her
paroxysms.  "Why don't you speak to me, Jude?" she cried out, after
one of these.  "Don't turn away from me!  I can't BEAR the loneliness
of being out of your looks!"

"There, dear; here I am," he said, putting his face close to hers.

"Yes...  Oh, my comrade, our perfect union--our two-in-oneness--is
now stained with blood!"

"Shadowed by death--that's all."

"Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn't know I was
doing it!  I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of
mature age.  I said the world was against us, that it was better to
be out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally.
And I told him I was going to have another child.  It upset him.  Oh
how bitterly he upbraided me!"

"Why did you do it, Sue?"

"I can't tell.  It was that I wanted to be truthful.  I couldn't
bear deceiving him as to the facts of life.  And yet I wasn't
truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.--Why
was I half-wiser than my fellow-women?  And not entirely wiser!  Why
didn't I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities?  It
was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things
nor reveal them!"

"Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases; only
in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps.  He must have
known sooner or later."

"And I was just making my baby darling a new frock; and now I shall
never see him in it, and never talk to him any more! ...  My eyes are
so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year
ago I called myself happy!  We went about loving each other too
much--indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other!  We
said--do you remember?--that we would make a virtue of joy.  I said
it was Nature's intention, Nature's law and _raison d'etre_ that we
should be joyful in what instincts she afforded us--instincts which
civilization had taken upon itself to thwart. What dreadful things I
said!  And now Fate has given us this stab in the back for being such
fools as to take Nature at her word!"

She sank into a quiet contemplation, till she said, "It is best,
perhaps, that they should be gone.--Yes--I see it is!  Better that
they should be plucked fresh than stay to wither away miserably!"

"Yes," replied Jude.  "Some say that the elders should rejoice when
their children die in infancy."

"But they don't know! ...  Oh my babies, my babies, could you be
alive now!  You may say the boy wished to be out of life, or he
wouldn't have done it.  It was not unreasonable for him to die: it
was part of his incurably sad nature, poor little fellow!  But then
the others--my OWN children and yours!"

Again Sue looked at the hanging little frock and at the socks and
shoes; and her figure quivered like a string.  "I am a pitiable
creature," she said, "good neither for earth nor heaven any more!
I am driven out of my mind by things!  What ought to be done?"
She stared at Jude, and tightly held his hand.

"Nothing can be done," he replied.  "Things are as they are, and will
be brought to their destined issue."

She paused.  "Yes!  Who said that?" she asked heavily.

"It comes in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_.  It has been in my mind
continually since this happened."

"My poor Jude--how you've missed everything!--you more than I, for
I did get you!  To think you should know that by your unassisted
reading, and yet be in poverty and despair!"

After such momentary diversions her grief would return in a wave.

The jury duly came and viewed the bodies, the inquest was held; and
next arrived the melancholy morning of the funeral.  Accounts in
the newspapers had brought to the spot curious idlers, who stood
apparently counting the window-panes and the stones of the walls.
Doubt of the real relations of the couple added zest to their
curiosity.  Sue had declared that she would follow the two little
ones to the grave, but at the last moment she gave way, and the
coffins were quietly carried out of the house while she was lying
down.  Jude got into the vehicle, and it drove away, much to the
relief of the landlord, who now had only Sue and her luggage
remaining on his hands, which he hoped to be also clear of later on
in the day, and so to have freed his house from the exasperating
notoriety it had acquired during the week through his wife's unlucky
admission of these strangers.  In the afternoon he privately
consulted with the owner of the house, and they agreed that if any
objection to it arose from the tragedy which had occurred there they
would try to get its number changed.

When Jude had seen the two little boxes--one containing little Jude,
and the other the two smallest--deposited in the earth he hastened
back to Sue, who was still in her room, and he therefore did not
disturb her just then.  Feeling anxious, however, he went again
about four o'clock.  The woman thought she was still lying down, but
returned to him to say that she was not in her bedroom after all.
Her hat and jacket, too, were missing: she had gone out.  Jude
hurried off to the public house where he was sleeping.  She had not
been there.  Then bethinking himself of possibilities he went along
the road to the cemetery, which he entered, and crossed to where the
interments had recently taken place.  The idlers who had followed to
the spot by reason of the tragedy were all gone now.  A man with a
shovel in his hands was attempting to earth in the common grave of
the three children, but his arm was held back by an expostulating
woman who stood in the half-filled hole.  It was Sue, whose coloured
clothing, which she had never thought of changing for the mourning he
had bought, suggested to the eye a deeper grief than the conventional
garb of bereavement could express.

"He's filling them in, and he shan't till I've seen my little ones
again!" she cried wildly when she saw Jude.  "I want to see them once
more.  Oh Jude--please Jude--I want to see them!  I didn't know you
would let them be taken away while I was asleep!  You said perhaps I
should see them once more before they were screwed down; and then you
didn't, but took them away!  Oh Jude, you are cruel to me too!"

"She's been wanting me to dig out the grave again, and let her get
to the coffins," said the man with the spade.  "She ought to be took
home, by the look o' her.  She is hardly responsible, poor thing,
seemingly.  Can't dig 'em up again now, ma'am.  Do ye go home with
your husband, and take it quiet, and thank God that there'll be
another soon to swage yer grief."

But Sue kept asking piteously: "Can't I see them once more--just
once!  Can't I?  Only just one little minute, Jude?  It would not
take long!  And I should be so glad, Jude!  I will be so good, and
not disobey you ever any more, Jude, if you will let me?  I would go
home quietly afterwards, and not want to see them any more!  Can't I?
Why can't I?"

Thus she went on.  Jude was thrown into such acute sorrow that he
almost felt he would try to get the man to accede.  But it could
do no good, and might make her still worse; and he saw that it
was imperative to get her home at once.  So he coaxed her, and
whispered tenderly, and put his arm round her to support her; till
she helplessly gave in, and was induced to leave the cemetery.

He wished to obtain a fly to take her back in, but economy being so
imperative she deprecated his doing so, and they walked along slowly,
Jude in black crape, she in brown and red clothing.  They were to
have gone to a new lodging that afternoon, but Jude saw that it was
not practicable, and in course of time they entered the now hated
house.  Sue was at once got to bed, and the Doctor sent for.

Jude waited all the evening downstairs.  At a very late hour the
intelligence was brought to him that a child had been prematurely
born, and that it, like the others, was a corpse.

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

completion: Little Father Time is depressed and gloomy at their inability to find lodgings. Before they go to bed, Sue talks to him and tells him that another baby is on the way. Little Father Time is horrified at the thought of another mouth to feed and bitterly blames Sue for having ruined them. He declares it would be better if he and the other children were gone. The next morning Sue goes out early to meet Jude and to tell him that she has failed to find any lodgings. When they return, Sue goes to wake the children but finds that Little Father Time has hanged the younger children and then himself. Sue is overcome with horror and falls unconscious. Jude too is overcome with grief. Later there is a coroner's inquest and then a funeral, which Jude does not allow Sue to attend. Jude, however, learns that Sue has gone on her own to the graveyard and is telling the gravedigger to stop filling the grave and to show her the dead children. Jude takes her back home, but her agitation and wild grief have already affected her health. She gives birth to a stillborn child.


prompt:
Chapter: Sue was convalescent, though she had hoped for death, and Jude had
again obtained work at his old trade.  They were in other lodgings
now, in the direction of Beersheba, and not far from the Church of
Ceremonies--Saint Silas.

They would sit silent, more bodeful of the direct antagonism of
things than of their insensate and stolid obstructiveness.  Vague
and quaint imaginings had haunted Sue in the days when her intellect
scintillated like a star, that the world resembled a stanza or melody
composed in a dream; it was wonderfully excellent to the half-aroused
intelligence, but hopelessly absurd at the full waking; that the
First Cause worked automatically like a somnambulist, and not
reflectively like a sage; that at the framing of the terrestrial
conditions there seemed never to have been contemplated such
a development of emotional perceptiveness among the creatures
subject to those conditions as that reached by thinking and
educated humanity.  But affliction makes opposing forces loom
anthropomorphous; and those ideas were now exchanged for a sense of
Jude and herself fleeing from a persecutor.

"We must conform!" she said mournfully.  "All the ancient wrath of
the Power above us has been vented upon us, His poor creatures, and
we must submit.  There is no choice.  We must.  It is no use fighting
against God!"

"It is only against man and senseless circumstance," said Jude.

"True!" she murmured.  "What have I been thinking of!  I am getting
as superstitious as a savage! ...  But whoever or whatever our foe
may be, I am cowed into submission.  I have no more fighting strength
left; no more enterprise.  I am beaten, beaten! ...  'We are made a
spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men!'  I am always
saying that now."

"I feel the same!"

"What shall we do?  You are in work now; but remember, it may
only be because our history and relations are not absolutely
known...  Possibly, if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they
would turn you out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!"

"I hardly know.  Perhaps they would hardly do that.  However, I think
that we ought to make it legal now--as soon as you are able to go
out."

"You think we ought?"

"Certainly."

And Jude fell into thought.  "I have seemed to myself lately,"
he said, "to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the
virtuous--the men called seducers.  It amazes me when I think of it!
I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you,
whom I love more than myself.  Yet I am one of those men!  I wonder
if any other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as
I? ...  Yes, Sue--that's what I am.  I seduced you...  You were a
distinct type--a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left
intact.  But I couldn't leave you alone!"

"No, no, Jude!" she said quickly.  "Don't reproach yourself with
being what you are not.  If anybody is to blame it is I."

"I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me
perhaps you wouldn't have urged him to let you go."

"I should have, just the same.  As to ourselves, the fact of our not
having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our
union.  We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity
of our first marriages."

"Solemnity?"  Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew
conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.

"Yes," she said, with a little quiver in her words, "I have had
dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action.
I have thought--that I am still his wife!"

"Whose?"

"Richard's."

"Good God, dearest!--why?"

"Oh I can't explain!  Only the thought comes to me."

"It is your weakness--a sick fancy, without reason or meaning!
Don't let it trouble you."

Sue sighed uneasily.

As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come
an improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in
their experience would have made them cheerful.  Jude had quite
unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost directly
he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and
outwardly his days went on with that monotonous uniformity which
is in itself so grateful after vicissitude.  People seemed to have
forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies, and he
daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could never
enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned windows he
would never look from, as if he had known no wish to do otherwise.

There was this change in him; that he did not often go to any service
at the churches now.  One thing troubled him more than any other;
that Sue and himself had mentally travelled in opposite directions
since the tragedy: events which had enlarged his own views of life,
laws, customs, and dogmas, had not operated in the same manner on
Sue's.  She was no longer the same as in the independent days, when
her intellect played like lambent lightning over conventions and
formalities which he at that time respected, though he did not now.

On a particular Sunday evening he came in rather late.  She was
not at home, but she soon returned, when he found her silent and
meditative.

"What are you thinking of, little woman?" he asked curiously.

"Oh I can't tell clearly!  I have thought that we have been selfish,
careless, even impious, in our courses, you and I.  Our life has been
a vain attempt at self-delight.  But self-abnegation is the higher
road.  We should mortify the flesh--the terrible flesh--the curse of
Adam!"

"Sue!" he murmured.  "What has come over you?"

"We ought to be continually sacrificing ourselves on the altar of
duty!  But I have always striven to do what has pleased me.  I well
deserved the scourging I have got!  I wish something would take the
evil right out of me, and all my monstrous errors, and all my sinful
ways!"

"Sue--my own too suffering dear!--there's no evil woman in you.  Your
natural instincts are perfectly healthy; not quite so impassioned,
perhaps, as I could wish; but good, and dear, and pure.  And as I
have often said, you are absolutely the most ethereal, least sensual
woman I ever knew to exist without inhuman sexlessness.  Why do you
talk in such a changed way?  We have not been selfish, except when no
one could profit by our being otherwise.  You used to say that human
nature was noble and long-suffering, not vile and corrupt, and at
last I thought you spoke truly.  And now you seem to take such a much
lower view!"

"I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had
them yet!"

"You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you
deserved more admiration than I gave.  I was too full of narrow
dogmas at that time to see it."

"Don't say that, Jude!  I wish my every fearless word and thought
could be rooted out of my history.  Self-renunciation--that's
everything!  I cannot humiliate myself too much.  I should like to
prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that's in
me!"

"Hush!" he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if
she were an infant.  "It is bereavement that has brought you to this!
Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked
ones of the earth--who never feel it!"

"I ought not to stay like this," she murmured, when she had remained
in the position a long while.

"Why not?"

"It is indulgence."

"Still on the same tack!  But is there anything better on earth than
that we should love one another?"

"Yes.  It depends on the sort of love; and yours--ours--is the
wrong."

"I won't have it, Sue!  Come, when do you wish our marriage to be
signed in a vestry?"

She paused, and looked up uneasily.  "Never," she whispered.

Not knowing the whole of her meaning he took the objection serenely,
and said nothing.  Several minutes elapsed, and he thought she had
fallen asleep; but he spoke softly, and found that she was wide awake
all the time.  She sat upright and sighed.

"There is a strange, indescribable perfume or atmosphere about you
to-night, Sue," he said.  "I mean not only mentally, but about your
clothes, also.  A sort of vegetable scent, which I seem to know, yet
cannot remember."

"It is incense."

"Incense?"

"I have been to the service at St. Silas', and I was in the fumes of
it."

"Oh--St. Silas."

"Yes.  I go there sometimes."

"Indeed.  You go there!"

"You see, Jude, it is lonely here in the weekday mornings, when you
are at work, and I think and think of--of my--"  She stopped till she
could control the lumpiness of her throat.  "And I have taken to go
in there, as it is so near."

"Oh well--of course, I say nothing against it.  Only it is odd, for
you.  They little think what sort of chiel is amang them!"

"What do you mean, Jude?"

"Well--a sceptic, to be plain."

"How can you pain me so, dear Jude, in my trouble!  Yet I know you
didn't mean it.  But you ought not to say that."

"I won't. But I am much surprised!"

"Well--I want to tell you something else, Jude.  You won't be angry,
will you?  I have thought of it a good deal since my babies died.
I don't think I ought to be your wife--or as your wife--any longer."

"What? ...  But you ARE!"

"From your point of view; but--"

"Of course we were afraid of the ceremony, and a good many others
would have been in our places, with such strong reasons for fears.
But experience has proved how we misjudged ourselves, and overrated
our infirmities; and if you are beginning to respect rites and
ceremonies, as you seem to be, I wonder you don't say it shall be
carried out instantly?  You certainly ARE my wife, Sue, in all but
law.  What do you mean by what you said?"

"I don't think I am!"

"Not?  But suppose we HAD gone through the ceremony?  Would you feel
that you were then?"

"No. I should not feel even then that I was.  I should feel worse
than I do now."

"Why so--in the name of all that's perverse, my dear?"

"Because I am Richard's."

"Ah--you hinted that absurd fancy to me before!"

"It was only an impression with me then; I feel more and more
convinced as time goes on that--I belong to him, or to nobody."

"My good heavens--how we are changing places!"

"Yes.  Perhaps so."

Some few days later, in the dusk of the summer evening, they were
sitting in the same small room downstairs, when a knock came to the
front door of the carpenter's house where they were lodging, and in a
few moments there was a tap at the door of their room.  Before they
could open it the comer did so, and a woman's form appeared.

"Is Mr. Fawley here?"

Jude and Sue started as he mechanically replied in the affirmative,
for the voice was Arabella's.

He formally requested her to come in, and she sat down in the window
bench, where they could distinctly see her outline against the light;
but no characteristic that enabled them to estimate her general
aspect and air.  Yet something seemed to denote that she was not
quite so comfortably circumstanced, nor so bouncingly attired, as she
had been during Cartlett's lifetime.

The three attempted an awkward conversation about the tragedy, of
which Jude had felt it to be his duty to inform her immediately,
though she had never replied to his letter.

"I have just come from the cemetery," she said.  "I inquired and
found the child's grave.  I couldn't come to the funeral--thank you
for inviting me all the same.  I read all about it in the papers,
and I felt I wasn't wanted...  No--I couldn't come to the funeral,"
repeated Arabella, who, seeming utterly unable to reach the ideal of
a catastrophic manner, fumbled with iterations.  "But I am glad I
found the grave.  As 'tis your trade, Jude, you'll be able to put up
a handsome stone to 'em."

"I shall put up a headstone," said Jude drearily.

"He was my child, and naturally I feel for him."

"I hope so.  We all did."

"The others that weren't mine I didn't feel so much for, as was
natural."

"Of course."

A sigh came from the dark corner where Sue sat.

"I had often wished I had mine with me," continued Mrs. Cartlett.
"Perhaps 'twouldn't have happened then!  But of course I didn't wish
to take him away from your wife."

"I am not his wife," came from Sue.

The unexpectedness of her words struck Jude silent.

"Oh, I beg your pardon, I'm sure," said Arabella.  "I thought you
were!"

Jude had known from the quality of Sue's tone that her new and
transcendental views lurked in her words; but all except their
obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella.  The latter,
after evincing that she was struck by Sue's avowal, recovered
herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness about "her" boy,
for whom, though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all,
she now exhibited a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently
sustaining to the conscience.  She alluded to the past, and in making
some remark appealed again to Sue.  There was no answer: Sue had
invisibly left the room.

"She said she was not your wife?" resumed Arabella in another voice.
"Why should she do that?"

"I cannot inform you," said Jude shortly.

"She is, isn't she?  She once told me so."

"I don't criticize what she says."

"Ah--I see!  Well, my time is up.  I am staying here to-night, and
thought I could do no less than call, after our mutual affliction.
I am sleeping at the place where I used to be barmaid, and to-morrow
I go back to Alfredston.  Father is come home again, and I am living
with him."

"He has returned from Australia?" said Jude with languid curiosity.

"Yes.  Couldn't get on there.  Had a rough time of it.  Mother died
of dys--what do you call it--in the hot weather, and Father and two
of the young ones have just got back.  He has got a cottage near the
old place, and for the present I am keeping house for him."

Jude's former wife had maintained a stereotyped manner of strict good
breeding even now that Sue was gone, and limited her stay to a number
of minutes that should accord with the highest respectability.  When
she had departed Jude, much relieved, went to the stairs and called
Sue--feeling anxious as to what had become of her.

There was no answer, and the carpenter who kept the lodgings said she
had not come in.  Jude was puzzled, and became quite alarmed at her
absence, for the hour was growing late.  The carpenter called his
wife, who conjectured that Sue might have gone to St. Silas' church,
as she often went there.

"Surely not at this time o' night?" said Jude.  "It is shut."

"She knows somebody who keeps the key, and she has it whenever she
wants it."

"How long has she been going on with this?"

"Oh, some few weeks, I think."

Jude went vaguely in the direction of the church, which he had never
once approached since he lived out that way years before, when his
young opinions were more mystical than they were now.  The spot was
deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch
without noise, and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely
still inside.  The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint sound,
explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came from the other
end of the building.  The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he
moved in that direction through the obscurity, which was broken only
by the faintest reflected night-light from without.

High overhead, above the chancel steps, Jude could discern a huge,
solidly constructed Latin cross--as large, probably, as the original
it was designed to commemorate.  It seemed to be suspended in the
air by invisible wires; it was set with large jewels, which faintly
glimmered in some weak ray caught from outside, as the cross swayed
to and fro in a silent and scarcely perceptible motion.  Underneath,
upon the floor, lay what appeared to be a heap of black clothes, and
from this was repeated the sobbing that he had heard before.  It was
his Sue's form, prostrate on the paving.

"Sue!" he whispered.

Something white disclosed itself; she had turned up her face.

"What--do you want with me here, Jude?" she said almost sharply.
"You shouldn't come!  I wanted to be alone!  Why did you intrude
here?"

"How can you ask!" he retorted in quick reproach, for his full heart
was wounded to its centre at this attitude of hers towards him.
"Why do I come?  Who has a right to come, I should like to know, if
I have not!  I, who love you better than my own self--better--far
better--than you have loved me!  What made you leave me to come here
alone?"

"Don't criticize me, Jude--I can't bear it!--I have often told
you so.  You must take me as I am.  I am a wretch--broken by my
distractions!  I couldn't BEAR it when Arabella came--I felt so
utterly miserable I had to come away.  She seems to be your wife
still, and Richard to be my husband!"

"But they are nothing to us!"

"Yes, dear friend, they are.  I see marriage differently now.  My
babies have been taken from me to show me this!  Arabella's child
killing mine was a judgement--the right slaying the wrong.  What,
WHAT shall I do!  I am such a vile creature--too worthless to mix
with ordinary human beings!"

"This is terrible!" said Jude, verging on tears.  "It is monstrous
and unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no
wrong!"

"Ah--you don't know my badness!"

He returned vehemently: "I do!  Every atom and dreg of it!  You make
me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it
may be called, if it's that which has caused this deterioration in
you.  That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like
a diamond--whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of,
if they could have known you--should degrade herself like this!  I am
glad I had nothing to do with Divinity--damn glad--if it's going to
ruin you in this way!"

"You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't see how things
are."

"Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall.  I am
overburdened--and you, too, are unhinged just now."  He put his arm
round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk
without his support.

"I don't dislike you, Jude," she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
"I love you as much as ever!  Only--I ought not to love you--any
more.  Oh I must not any more!"

"I can't own it."

"But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife!  I belong to
him--I sacramentally joined myself to him for life.  Nothing can
alter it!"

"But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this
world?  Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!"

"But not Heaven's.  Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester."

"Sue, Sue--affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this--for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in
me for the Church as an old acquaintance...  What I can't understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic.  Is it
peculiar to you, or is it common to woman?  Is a woman a thinking
unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer?  How you
argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract--which it is--how you
showed all the objections to it--all the absurdities!  If two and two
made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now?  I
can't understand it, I repeat!"

"Ah, dear Jude; that's because you are like a totally deaf man
observing people listening to music.  You say 'What are they
regarding?  Nothing is there.'  But something is."

"That is a hard saying from you; and not a true parallel!  You threw
off old husks of prejudices, and taught me to do it; and now you go
back upon yourself.  I confess I am utterly stultified in my estimate
of you."

"Dear friend, my only friend, don't be hard with me!  I can't help
being as I am, I am convinced I am right--that I see the light at
last.  But oh, how to profit by it!"

They walked along a few more steps till they were outside the
building and she had returned the key.  "Can this be the girl," said
Jude when she came back, feeling a slight renewal of elasticity now
that he was in the open street; "can this be the girl who brought
the pagan deities into this most Christian city?--who mimicked Miss
Fontover when she crushed them with her heel?--quoted Gibbon, and
Shelley, and Mill?  Where are dear Apollo, and dear Venus now!"

"Oh don't, don't be so cruel to me, Jude, and I so unhappy!" she
sobbed.  "I can't bear it!  I was in error--I cannot reason with you.
I was wrong--proud in my own conceit!  Arabella's coming was the
finish.  Don't satirize me: it cuts like a knife!"

He flung his arms round her and kissed her passionately there in the
silent street, before she could hinder him.  They went on till they
came to a little coffee-house. "Jude," she said with suppressed
tears, "would you mind getting a lodging here?"

"I will--if, if you really wish?  But do you?  Let me go to our door
and understand you."

He went and conducted her in.  She said she wanted no supper, and
went in the dark upstairs and struck a light.  Turning she found that
Jude had followed her, and was standing at the chamber door.  She
went to him, put her hand in his, and said "Good-night."

"But Sue!  Don't we live here?"

"You said you would do as I wished!"

"Yes.  Very well! ...  Perhaps it was wrong of me to argue
distastefully as I have done!  Perhaps as we couldn't conscientiously
marry at first in the old-fashioned way, we ought to have parted.
Perhaps the world is not illuminated enough for such experiments as
ours!  Who were we, to think we could act as pioneers!"

"I am so glad you see that much, at any rate.  I never deliberately
meant to do as I did.  I slipped into my false position through
jealousy and agitation!"

"But surely through love--you loved me?"

"Yes.  But I wanted to let it stop there, and go on always as mere
lovers; until--"

"But people in love couldn't live for ever like that!"

"Women could: men can't, because they--won't. An average woman is
in this superior to an average man--that she never instigates, only
responds.  We ought to have lived in mental communion, and no more."

"I was the unhappy cause of the change, as I have said
before! ...  Well, as you will! ...  But human nature can't help
being itself."

"Oh yes--that's just what it has to learn--self-mastery."

"I repeat--if either were to blame it was not you but I."

"No--it was I.  Your wickedness was only the natural man's desire
to possess the woman.  Mine was not the reciprocal wish till envy
stimulated me to oust Arabella.  I had thought I ought in charity to
let you approach me--that it was damnably selfish to torture you as
I did my other friend.  But I shouldn't have given way if you hadn't
broken me down by making me fear you would go back to her...  But
don't let us say any more about it!  Jude, will you leave me to
myself now?"

"Yes...  But Sue--my wife, as you are!" he burst out; "my old
reproach to you was, after all, a true one.  You have never loved me
as I love you--never--never!  Yours is not a passionate heart--your
heart does not burn in a flame!  You are, upon the whole, a sort of
fay, or sprite--not a woman!"

"At first I did not love you, Jude; that I own.  When I first knew
you I merely wanted you to love me.  I did not exactly flirt with
you; but that inborn craving which undermines some women's morals
almost more than unbridled passion--the craving to attract and
captivate, regardless of the injury it may do the man--was in me; and
when I found I had caught you, I was frightened.  And then--I don't
know how it was--I couldn't bear to let you go--possibly to Arabella
again--and so I got to love you, Jude.  But you see, however fondly
it ended, it began in the selfish and cruel wish to make your heart
ache for me without letting mine ache for you."

"And now you add to your cruelty by leaving me!"

"Ah--yes!  The further I flounder, the more harm I do!"

"O Sue!" said he with a sudden sense of his own danger.  "Do not
do an immoral thing for moral reasons!  You have been my social
salvation.  Stay with me for humanity's sake!  You know what a weak
fellow I am.  My two arch-enemies you know--my weakness for womankind
and my impulse to strong liquor.  Don't abandon me to them, Sue, to
save your own soul only!  They have been kept entirely at a distance
since you became my guardian-angel!  Since I have had you I have been
able to go into any temptations of the sort, without risk.  Isn't
my safety worth a little sacrifice of dogmatic principle?  I am in
terror lest, if you leave me, it will be with me another case of the
pig that was washed turning back to his wallowing in the mire!"

Sue burst out weeping.  "Oh, but you must not, Jude!  You won't!
I'll pray for you night and day!"

"Well--never mind; don't grieve," said Jude generously.  "I did
suffer, God knows, about you at that time; and now I suffer again.
But perhaps not so much as you.  The woman mostly gets the worst of
it in the long run!"

"She does."

"Unless she is absolutely worthless and contemptible.  And this one
is not that, anyhow!"

Sue drew a nervous breath or two.  "She is--I fear! ...  Now
Jude--good-night,--please!"

"I mustn't stay?--Not just once more?  As it has been so many
times--O Sue, my wife, why not?"

"No--no--not wife! ...  I am in your hands, Jude--don't tempt me back
now I have advanced so far!"

"Very well.  I do your bidding.  I owe that to you, darling, in
penance for how I overruled it at the first time.  My God, how
selfish I was!  Perhaps--perhaps I spoilt one of the highest and
purest loves that ever existed between man and woman! ...  Then let
the veil of our temple be rent in two from this hour!"

He went to the bed, removed one of the pair of pillows thereon, and
flung it to the floor.

Sue looked at him, and bending over the bed-rail wept silently.
"You don't see that it is a matter of conscience with me, and not
of dislike to you!" she brokenly murmured.  "Dislike to you!  But I
can't say any more--it breaks my heart--it will be undoing all I
have begun!  Jude--good-night!"

"Good-night," he said, and turned to go.

"Oh but you shall kiss me!" said she, starting up.  "I
can't--bear--!"

He clasped her, and kissed her weeping face as he had scarcely ever
done before, and they remained in silence till she said, "Good-bye,
good-bye!" And then gently pressing him away she got free, trying to
mitigate the sadness by saying: "We'll be dear friends just the same,
Jude, won't we?  And we'll see each other sometimes--yes!--and forget
all this, and try to be as we were long ago?"

Jude did not permit himself to speak, but turned and descended the
stairs.

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

completion: The death of the three children has left Sue emotionally scarred. She begins to develop an obsession about religion and her own sinfulness. She regards the tragedy as a judgment of God and begins to talk of "self-renunciation" and starts attending the church of St. Silas. Jude is amazed and disturbed at Sue's strange behavior and proposes that they marry. But Sue refuses, saying she is still morally bound to Phillotson, and that she and Jude ought not to behave as man and wife. One day while Jude and Sue are debating such matters, Arabella turns up. She has read of the tragedy in the papers, and after going to visit Little Father Time's grave, she has come to pay them a visit. While they are talking, Sue suddenly denies that she is Jude's wife and leaves the room. Arabella tells Jude that she is now living at Alfredston with her father, who has returned from Australia. Later, after Arabella leaves, Jude goes to look for Sue, and he finally finds her in St. Silas' church where she lies prostrate before a cross. She tells Jude that the death of the children is a divine punishment for her sins and that she is still Phillotson's wife. They discuss their relationship, and Sue admits that she gave herself to him  because she was jealous of Arabella. Jude cries out that Sue does not and never has loved him as he loves her. He begs her not to abandon him lest he fall into the temptation to drink. But Sue is adamant and insists that they live separately because her conscience demands it, although they can still be friends and meet occasionally.