prompt:
Chapter: On the morrow between nine and half-past they were journeying back
to Christminster, the only two occupants of a compartment in a
third-class railway-carriage.  Having, like Jude, made rather a
hasty toilet to catch the train, Arabella looked a little frowsy,
and her face was very far from possessing the animation which had
characterized it at the bar the night before.  When they came out of
the station she found that she still had half an hour to spare before
she was due at the bar.  They walked in silence a little way out of
the town in the direction of Alfredston.  Jude looked up the far
highway.

"Ah ... poor feeble me!" he murmured at last.

"What?" said she.

"This is the very road by which I came into Christminster years ago
full of plans!"

"Well, whatever the road is I think my time is nearly up, as I have
to be in the bar by eleven o'clock.  And as I said, I shan't ask for
the day to go with you to see your aunt.  So perhaps we had better
part here.  I'd sooner not walk up Chief Street with you, since we've
come to no conclusion at all."

"Very well.  But you said when we were getting up this morning that
you had something you wished to tell me before I left?"

"So I had--two things--one in particular.  But you wouldn't promise
to keep it a secret.  I'll tell you now if you promise?  As an honest
woman I wish you to know it...  It was what I began telling you
in the night--about that gentleman who managed the Sydney hotel."
Arabella spoke somewhat hurriedly for her.  "You'll keep it close?"

"Yes--yes--I promise!" said Jude impatiently.  "Of course I don't
want to reveal your secrets."

"Whenever I met him out for a walk, he used to say that he was much
taken with my looks, and he kept pressing me to marry him.  I never
thought of coming back to England again; and being out there in
Australia, with no home of my own after leaving my father, I at last
agreed, and did."

"What--marry him?"

"Yes."

"Regularly--legally--in church?"

"Yes.  And lived with him till shortly before I left.  It was stupid,
I know; but I did!  There, now I've told you.  Don't round upon me!
He talks of coming back to England, poor old chap.  But if he does,
he won't be likely to find me."

Jude stood pale and fixed.

"Why the devil didn't you tell me last, night!" he said.

"Well--I didn't...  Won't you make it up with me, then?"

"So in talking of 'your husband' to the bar gentlemen you meant him,
of course--not me!"

"Of course...  Come, don't fuss about it."

"I have nothing more to say!" replied Jude.  "I have nothing at all
to say about the--crime--you've confessed to!"

"Crime!  Pooh.  They don't think much of such as that over there!
Lots of 'em do it...  Well, if you take it like that I shall go back
to him!  He was very fond of me, and we lived honourable enough, and
as respectable as any married couple in the colony!  How did I know
where you were?"

"I won't go blaming you.  I could say a good deal; but perhaps it
would be misplaced.  What do you wish me to do?"

"Nothing.  There was one thing more I wanted to tell you; but I fancy
we've seen enough of one another for the present!  I shall think over
what you said about your circumstances, and let you know."

Thus they parted.  Jude watched her disappear in the direction of
the hotel, and entered the railway station close by.  Finding that
it wanted three-quarters of an hour of the time at which he could
get a train back to Alfredston, he strolled mechanically into the
city as far as to the Fourways, where he stood as he had so often
stood before, and surveyed Chief Street stretching ahead, with its
college after college, in picturesqueness unrivalled except by such
Continental vistas as the Street of Palaces in Genoa; the lines
of the buildings being as distinct in the morning air as in an
architectural drawing.  But Jude was far from seeing or criticizing
these things; they were hidden by an indescribable consciousness of
Arabella's midnight contiguity, a sense of degradation at his revived
experiences with her, of her appearance as she lay asleep at dawn,
which set upon his motionless face a look as of one accurst.  If he
could only have felt resentment towards her he would have been less
unhappy; but he pitied while he contemned her.

Jude turned and retraced his steps.  Drawing again towards the
station he started at hearing his name pronounced--less at the name
than at the voice.  To his great surprise no other than Sue stood
like a vision before him--her look bodeful and anxious as in a dream,
her little mouth nervous, and her strained eyes speaking reproachful
inquiry.

"Oh, Jude--I am so glad--to meet you like this!" she said in quick,
uneven accents not far from a sob.  Then she flushed as she observed
his thought that they had not met since her marriage.

They looked away from each other to hide their emotion, took each
other's hand without further speech, and went on together awhile,
till she glanced at him with furtive solicitude.  "I arrived at
Alfredston station last night, as you asked me to, and there was
nobody to meet me!  But I reached Marygreen alone, and they told me
Aunt was a trifle better.  I sat up with her, and as you did not come
all night I was frightened about you--I thought that perhaps, when
you found yourself back in the old city, you were upset at--at
thinking I was--married, and not there as I used to be; and that you
had nobody to speak to; so you had tried to drown your gloom--as you
did at that former time when you were disappointed about entering as
a student, and had forgotten your promise to me that you never would
again.  And this, I thought, was why you hadn't come to meet me!"

"And you came to hunt me up, and deliver me, like a good angel!"

"I thought I would come by the morning train and try to find you--in
case--in case--"

"I did think of my promise to you, dear, continually!  I shall never
break out again as I did, I am sure.  I may have been doing nothing
better, but I was not doing that--I loathe the thought of it."

"I am glad your staying had nothing to do with that.  But," she said,
the faintest pout entering into her tone, "you didn't come back last
night and meet me, as you engaged to!"

"I didn't--I am sorry to say.  I had an appointment at nine
o'clock--too late for me to catch the train that would have met
yours, or to get home at all."

Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender
thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever
had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature
that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt
heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had
spent in Arabella's company.  There was something rude and immoral
in thrusting these recent facts of his life upon the mind of one who,
to him, was so uncarnate as to seem at times impossible as a human
wife to any average man.  And yet she was Phillotson's.  How she had
become such, how she lived as such, passed his comprehension as he
regarded her to-day.

"You'll go back with me?" he said.  "There's a train just now.  I
wonder how my aunt is by this time...  And so, Sue, you really came
on my account all this way!  At what an early time you must have
started, poor thing!"

"Yes.  Sitting up watching alone made me all nerves for you, and
instead of going to bed when it got light I started.  And now you
won't frighten me like this again about your morals for nothing?"

He was not so sure that she had been frightened about his morals for
nothing.  He released her hand till they had entered the train,--it
seemed the same carriage he had lately got out of with another--where
they sat down side by side, Sue between him and the window.  He
regarded the delicate lines of her profile, and the small, tight,
applelike convexities of her bodice, so different from Arabella's
amplitudes.  Though she knew he was looking at her she did not turn
to him, but kept her eyes forward, as if afraid that by meeting his
own some troublous discussion would be initiated.

"Sue--you are married now, you know, like me; and yet we have been in
such a hurry that we have not said a word about it!"

"There's no necessity," she quickly returned.

"Oh well--perhaps not...  But I wish"

"Jude--don't talk about ME--I wish you wouldn't!" she entreated.
"It distresses me, rather.  Forgive my saying it! ...  Where did you
stay last night?"

She had asked the question in perfect innocence, to change the topic.
He knew that, and said merely, "At an inn," though it would have been
a relief to tell her of his meeting with an unexpected one.  But the
latter's final announcement of her marriage in Australia bewildered
him lest what he might say should do his ignorant wife an injury.

Their talk proceeded but awkwardly till they reached Alfredston.
That Sue was not as she had been, but was labelled "Phillotson,"
paralyzed Jude whenever he wanted to commune with her as an
individual.  Yet she seemed unaltered--he could not say why.
There remained the five-mile extra journey into the country, which
it was just as easy to walk as to drive, the greater part of it being
uphill.  Jude had never before in his life gone that road with Sue,
though he had with another.  It was now as if he carried a bright
light which temporarily banished the shady associations of the
earlier time.

Sue talked; but Jude noticed that she still kept the conversation
from herself.  At length he inquired if her husband were well.

"O yes," she said.  "He is obliged to be in the school all the day,
or he would have come with me.  He is so good and kind that to
accompany me he would have dismissed the school for once, even
against his principles--for he is strongly opposed to giving casual
holidays--only I wouldn't let him.  I felt it would be better to come
alone.  Aunt Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being
almost a stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both.
Since it turns out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not
ask him."

Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed.  "Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,"
he said.

"Of course."

"You ought to be a happy wife."

"And of course I am."

"Bride, I might almost have said, as yet.  It is not so many weeks
since I gave you to him, and--"

"Yes, I know!  I know!"  There was something in her face which belied
her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken
that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in "The
Wife's Guide to Conduct."  Jude knew the quality of every vibration
in Sue's voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and
he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a
month married.  But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last
of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing;
for Sue naturally did such things as those.

"Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson."

She reproached him by a glance.

"No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson," murmured Jude.  "You are dear,
free Sue Bridehead, only you don't know it!  Wifedom has not yet
squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no
further individuality."

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, "Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!"

"But it has!" he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the
Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and
quarrelled, he turned to look at it.  A squalid family lived there
now.  He could not help saying to Sue: "That's the house my wife and
I occupied the whole of the time we lived together.  I brought her
home to that house."

She looked at it.  "That to you was what the school-house at Shaston
is to me."

"Yes; but I was not very happy there as you are in yours."

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way
till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it.  "Of course I
may have exaggerated your happiness--one never knows," he continued
blandly.

"Don't think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said
it to sting me!  He's as good to me as a man can be, and gives me
perfect liberty--which elderly husbands don't do in general...  If
you think I am not happy because he's too old for me, you are wrong."

"I don't think anything against him--to you dear."

"And you won't say things to distress me, will you?"

"I will not."

He said no more, but he knew that, from some cause or other, in
taking Phillotson as a husband, Sue felt that she had done what she
ought not to have done.

They plunged into the concave field on the other side of which rose
the village--the field wherein Jude had received a thrashing from
the farmer many years earlier.  On ascending to the village and
approaching the house they found Mrs. Edlin standing at the door, who
at sight of them lifted her hands deprecatingly.  "She's downstairs,
if you'll believe me!" cried the widow.  "Out o' bed she got, and
nothing could turn her.  What will come o't I do not know!"

On entering, there indeed by the fireplace sat the old woman, wrapped
in blankets, and turning upon them a countenance like that of
Sebastiano's Lazarus.  They must have looked their amazement, for she
said in a hollow voice:

"Ah--sceered ye, have I!  I wasn't going to bide up there no longer,
to please nobody!  'Tis more than flesh and blood can bear, to be
ordered to do this and that by a feller that don't know half as well
as you do yourself! ...  Ah--you'll rue this marrying as well as
he!" she added, turning to Sue.  "All our family do--and nearly all
everybody else's.  You should have done as I did, you simpleton!  And
Phillotson the schoolmaster, of all men!  What made 'ee marry him?"

"What makes most women marry, Aunt?"

"Ah!  You mean to say you loved the man!"

"I don't meant to say anything definite."

"Do ye love un?"

"Don't ask me, Aunt."

"I can mind the man very well.  A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!--I don't want to wownd your feelings, but--there be certain men
here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach.  I should
have said he was one.  I don't say so NOW, since you must ha' known
better than I--but that's what I SHOULD have said!"

Sue jumped up and went out.  Jude followed her, and found her in the
outhouse, crying.

"Don't cry, dear!" said Jude in distress.  "She means well, but is
very crusty and queer now, you know."

"Oh no--it isn't that!" said Sue, trying to dry her eyes.  "I don't
mind her roughness one bit."

"What is it, then?"

"It is that what she says is--is true!"

"God--what--you don't like him?" asked Jude.

"I don't mean that!" she said hastily.  "That I ought--perhaps I
ought not to have married!"

He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first.
They went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took
rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly
married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her.
In the afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to
drive her to Alfredston.

"I'll go with you to the station, if you'd like?" he said.

She would not let him.  The man came round with the trap, and Jude
helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she
looked at him prohibitively.

"I suppose--I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at
Melchester?" he half-crossly observed.

She bent down and said softly: "No, dear--you are not to come yet.
I don't think you are in a good mood."

"Very well," said Jude.  "Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" She waved her hand and was gone.

"She's right!  I won't go!" he murmured.

He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in
attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love
her.  He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church
history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century.  Before
he had returned from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter
from Arabella.  The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of
self-condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his
attachment to Sue.

The letter, he perceived, bore a London postmark instead of the
Christminster one.  Arabella informed him that a few days after their
parting in the morning at Christminster, she had been surprised by an
affectionate letter from her Australian husband, formerly manager of
the hotel in Sydney.  He had come to England on purpose to find her;
and had taken a free, fully-licensed public, in Lambeth, where he
wished her to join him in conducting the business, which was likely
to be a very thriving one, the house being situated in an excellent,
densely populated, gin-drinking neighbourhood, and already doing a
trade of L200 a month, which could be easily doubled.

As he had said that he loved her very much still, and implored her to
tell him where she was, and as they had only parted in a slight tiff,
and as her engagement in Christminster was only temporary, she had
just gone to join him as he urged.  She could not help feeling that
she belonged to him more than to Jude, since she had properly married
him, and had lived with him much longer than with her first husband.
In thus wishing Jude good-bye she bore him no ill-will, and trusted
he would not turn upon her, a weak woman, and inform against her,
and bring her to ruin now that she had a chance of improving her
circumstances and leading a genteel life.

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

completion: Having spent the night together as man and wife, Jude and Arabella return to Christminster the next day. Arabella tells Jude that she has remarried a Sydney hotel manager while in Australia, and that her new husband is thinking of following her to England. Jude is amazed and angry, but Arabella appears unconcerned about the fact that it is a bigamous marriage and invalid according to law. She declares that she may return to her Australian husband. They part and Jude continues walking through Christminster when he suddenly meets Sue, who has come to look for him. She is anxious at his not having kept his appointment and afraid that he might have been drinking. Jude does not tell her about Arabella's return, and they take the train back to Marygreen to see Aunt Drusilla. Jude has a feeling that Sue is not very happy with Phillotson although she speaks of him as a kind, generous husband. When they reach Aunt Drusilla's cottage, they are surprised to see that she is up and about, against doctor's orders. She tells Sue that marrying Phillotson was indeed a foolish thing to do. Sue is distressed and later admits to Jude that as Aunt Drusilla says, she should not have married. Asking Jude not to visit her, Sue leaves and goes back to Phillotson. Jude remains at Marygreen, trying to discipline himself by reading church history and sermons. A few days later a letter from Arabella announces that she has rejoined her Australian husband in London, who is now running a pub in Lambeth. She hopes Jude will keep quiet about their earlier marriage.


prompt:
Chapter: Jude returned to Melchester, which had the questionable
recommendation of being only a dozen and a half miles from his Sue's
now permanent residence.  At first he felt that this nearness was a
distinct reason for not going southward at all; but Christminster
was too sad a place to bear, while the proximity of Shaston to
Melchester might afford him the glory of worsting the Enemy in a
close engagement, such as was deliberately sought by the priests and
virgins of the early Church, who, disdaining an ignominious flight
from temptation, became even chamber-partners with impunity.
Jude did not pause to remember that, in the laconic words of the
historian, "insulted Nature sometimes vindicated her rights" in such
circumstances.

He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the
priesthood--in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his
aims, and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable
of late.  His passion for Sue troubled his soul; yet his lawful
abandonment to the society of Arabella for twelve hours seemed
instinctively a worse thing--even though she had not told him of her
Sydney husband till afterwards.  He had, he verily believed, overcome
all tendency to fly to liquor--which, indeed, he had never done from
taste, but merely as an escape from intolerable misery of mind.  Yet
he perceived with despondency that, taken all round, he was a man of
too many passions to make a good clergyman; the utmost he could hope
for was that in a life of constant internal warfare between flesh and
spirit the former might not always be victorious.

As a hobby, auxiliary to his readings in Divinity, he developed his
slight skill in church-music and thorough-bass, till he could join in
part-singing from notation with some accuracy.  A mile or two from
Melchester there was a restored village church, to which Jude had
originally gone to fix the new columns and capitals.  By this means
he had become acquainted with the organist, and the ultimate result
was that he joined the choir as a bass voice.

He walked out to this parish twice every Sunday, and sometimes in the
week.  One evening about Easter the choir met for practice, and a new
hymn which Jude had heard of as being by a Wessex composer was to be
tried and prepared for the following week.  It turned out to be a
strangely emotional composition.  As they all sang it over and over
again its harmonies grew upon Jude, and moved him exceedingly.

When they had finished he went round to the organist to make
inquiries.  The score was in manuscript, the name of the composer
being at the head, together with the title of the hymn: "The Foot
of the Cross."

"Yes," said the organist.  "He is a local man.  He is a professional
musician at Kennetbridge--between here and Christminster.  The
vicar knows him.  He was brought up and educated in Christminster
traditions, which accounts for the quality of the piece.  I think he
plays in the large church there, and has a surpliced choir.  He comes
to Melchester sometimes, and once tried to get the cathedral organ
when the post was vacant.  The hymn is getting about everywhere this
Easter."

As he walked humming the air on his way home, Jude fell to musing
on its composer, and the reasons why he composed it.  What a man of
sympathies he must be!  Perplexed and harassed as he himself was
about Sue and Arabella, and troubled as was his conscience by the
complication of his position, how he would like to know that man!
"He of all men would understand my difficulties," said the impulsive
Jude.  If there were any person in the world to choose as a
confidant, this composer would be the one, for he must have suffered,
and throbbed, and yearned.

In brief, ill as he could afford the time and money for the journey,
Fawley resolved, like the child that he was, to go to Kennetbridge
the very next Sunday.  He duly started, early in the morning, for it
was only by a series of crooked railways that he could get to the
town.  About mid-day he reached it, and crossing the bridge into the
quaint old borough he inquired for the house of the composer.

They told him it was a red brick building some little way further on.
Also that the gentleman himself had just passed along the street not
five minutes before.

"Which way?" asked Jude with alacrity.

"Straight along homeward from church."

Jude hastened on, and soon had the pleasure of observing a man in a
black coat and a black slouched felt hat no considerable distance
ahead.  Stretching out his legs yet more widely, he stalked after.
"A hungry soul in pursuit of a full soul!" he said.  "I must speak
to that man!"

He could not, however, overtake the musician before he had entered
his own house, and then arose the question if this were an expedient
time to call.  Whether or not he decided to do so there and then, now
that he had got here, the distance home being too great for him to
wait till late in the afternoon.  This man of soul would understand
scant ceremony, and might be quite a perfect adviser in a case in
which an earthly and illegitimate passion had cunningly obtained
entrance into his heart through the opening afforded for religion.

Jude accordingly rang the bell, and was admitted.

The musician came to him in a moment, and being respectably dressed,
good-looking, and frank in manner, Jude obtained a favourable
reception.  He was nevertheless conscious that there would be a
certain awkwardness in explaining his errand.

"I have been singing in the choir of a little church near
Melchester," he said.  "And we have this week practised 'The Foot
of the Cross,' which I understand, sir, that you composed?"

"I did--a year or so ago."

"I--like it.  I think it supremely beautiful!"

"Ah well--other people have said so too.  Yes, there's money in
it, if I could only see about getting it published.  I have other
compositions to go with it, too; I wish I could bring them out; for
I haven't made a five-pound note out of any of them yet.  These
publishing people--they want the copyright of an obscure composer's
work, such as mine is, for almost less than I should have to pay a
person for making a fair manuscript copy of the score.  The one you
speak of I have lent to various friends about here and Melchester,
and so it has got to be sung a little.  But music is a poor staff to
lean on--I am giving it up entirely.  You must go into trade if you
want to make money nowadays.  The wine business is what I am thinking
of.  This is my forthcoming list--it is not issued yet--but you can
take one."

He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in booklet
shape, ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth
the various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines
with which he purposed to initiate his new venture.  It took Jude
more than by surprise that the man with the soul was thus and thus;
and he felt that he could not open up his confidences.

They talked a little longer, but constrainedly, for when the musician
found that Jude was a poor man his manner changed from what it had
been while Jude's appearance and address deceived him as to his
position and pursuits.  Jude stammered out something about his
feelings in wishing to congratulate the author on such an exalted
composition, and took an embarrassed leave.

All the way home by the slow Sunday train, sitting in the fireless
waiting-rooms on this cold spring day, he was depressed enough at
his simplicity in taking such a journey.  But no sooner did he reach
his Melchester lodging than he found awaiting him a letter which had
arrived that morning a few minutes after he had left the house.  It
was a contrite little note from Sue, in which she said, with sweet
humility, that she felt she had been horrid in telling him he
was not to come to see her, that she despised herself for having
been so conventional; and that he was to be sure to come by the
eleven-forty-five train that very Sunday, and have dinner with them
at half-past one.

Jude almost tore his hair at having missed this letter till it was
too late to act upon its contents; but he had chastened himself
considerably of late, and at last his chimerical expedition
to Kennetbridge really did seem to have been another special
intervention of Providence to keep him away from temptation.  But a
growing impatience of faith, which he had noticed in himself more
than once of late, made him pass over in ridicule the idea that God
sent people on fools' errands.  He longed to see her; he was angry
at having missed her: and he wrote instantly, telling her what had
happened, and saying he had not enough patience to wait till the
following Sunday, but would come any day in the week that she liked
to name.

Since he wrote a little over-ardently, Sue, as her manner was,
delayed her reply till Thursday before Good Friday, when she said he
might come that afternoon if he wished, this being the earliest day
on which she could welcome him, for she was now assistant-teacher in
her husband's school.  Jude therefore got leave from the cathedral
works at the trifling expense of a stoppage of pay, and went.

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

completion: Determined to overcome his passion for Sue, Jude returns to Melchester and plunges seriously into his studies for the ministry. He begins to realize that his passions conflict with his aim of being a clergyman, and he decides to take up sacred music as a hobby. He joins a church choir and is deeply moved by a new hymn the choir is learning for Easter. On learning the composer is a professional musician living at Kennetbridge, Jude decides to meet him, hoping that the man will understand his spiritual conflict. But Jude is bitterly disappointed with the meeting. The man is interested only in making money and is planning to go into the wine trade, which will be far more lucrative as a business than music. Jude returns to Melchester where he finds a letter from Sue, inviting him to lunch with her that very Sunday. He immediately forgets all his resolutions and arranges to meet her later that week.


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

Shaston, the ancient British Palladour,

     From whose foundation first such strange reports
     arise,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Because what?"

"I am not that sort--quite."

"Not easily moved?"

"I didn't quite mean that."

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

"But not at head."

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

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

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

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

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

"What--you know him?"

"I went to see him."

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes," said Jude.

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

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

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

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

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

She regarded him curiously.

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

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

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

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

"Yes, perhaps."

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

"No. Don't come!"

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

"No."

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

"No, I am not."

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

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

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

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

"Are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

completion: Jude visits Sue at the school at Shaston. He waits in the empty schoolroom and plays the hymn that has so enchanted him. Sue comes in silently. She also plays it for him, and they are both so moved by its beauty that Jude comments that they are very much alike. They talk about a number of subjects, and Sue mentions her former friend, the university student, until Jude, stung by jealousy, accuses her of being "a flirt. She is upset and tries to defend herself and her right to love. She talks of the conflicts she experiences and the difficulty of fitting into the conventional role that society reserves for women. They part and Sue invites him to visit her a week later. Jude wanders about town and nears Sue's house. Through the window he sees her take a photograph out of her workbox, gaze at it and hold it close to her heart. Although he is not sure, Jude hopes it is his own, and he knows he will see her again soon.


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

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

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY.

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

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

   JUDE.

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

   Your aunt is sinking.  Come at once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dear faithful Sue!" murmured Jude.

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

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

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

"Yes.  Particularly for members of our family."

Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Chose freely!'"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No!  Why?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes; very."

"But I must tell him."

"Who?"

"Richard."

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

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

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

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

"I've seen Arabella."

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

"When I was at Christminster."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I told you not to, Jude!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, dear!"

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

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

"Did it keep you awake?" he said.

"No--I was awake."

"How was that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You must go in now!"

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

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

completion: The next day, Sue, having changed her mind as usual, writes Jude a note saying he must not come to Shaston. Jude writes back agreeing not to meet her. But on Easter Monday he gets a message from Mrs. Edlin saying that his aunt's health is sinking. Jude rushes to Marygreen to find Aunt Drusilla already dead. He informs Sue, who arrives for the funeral. After the funeral, Sue and Jude have a discussion about Aunt Drusilla's disapproval of marriage for the Fawleys. Sue confesses to an intense physical aversion to Phillotson, although she respects and likes him as a friend. Jude senses her unhappiness and laments the fact that he did not try to prevent her hasty marriage. Sue will not let Jude comfort her and goes off to Widow Edlin's cottage for the night. Later that night, Jude hears the cry of trapped rabbit, and, unable to bear it, he goes out and relieves it of further pain by putting it to death. He finds Sue awake at her window, and she breaks down and pours out all her suffering to him. She finally admits her mistake in not considering the full implications of marriage.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who is then?  Am I?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't object to know."

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

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

"Ah!" she said with pained surprise.

"I didn't doubt you."

"But you inquired!"

"I took his word."

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

"It is irregular."

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

"But we married--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"As his wife?"

"As I choose."

Phillotson writhed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To this he returned no answer.

She wrote again:

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

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

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

One line from her:

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

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

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

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

completion: The next day Sue is to return to Shaston, and they set out for the railroad station. Before they part, Jude and Sue embrace and kiss. Jude returns to Marygreen and realizes that he is facing a conflict: he cannot continue to be attached to Sue and still hope to be ordained a clergyman. He admits with painful honesty that he is not fit to hold any position in the church. That evening he burns all his books of theological works and feels relieved. Sue returns to Shaston desperately worried and miserable. That night she sleeps in a stuffy closet in order not to share the same bedroom with Phillotson. The following morning she asks Phillotson if she can live separately from him. Phillotson is astonished and does not understand her request. He wonders why she married him at all. Sue admits that it was her fault in not breaking off the engagement. Further, she confesses that she had agreed to marry him only because she was afraid of the scandal at the training college. She begs him to release her from the bond. Phillotson is horrified and accuses her of having been in love with Jude all this time. During the day Phillotson and Sue correspond by exchanging notes while teaching in their different classrooms. Phillotson finally consents to let Sue live separately in his own house, but not with Jude, as she had wanted.