prompt:
Chapter: Despite himself Jude recovered somewhat, and worked at his trade for
several weeks.  After Christmas, however, he broke down again.

With the money he had earned he shifted his lodgings to a yet more
central part of the town.  But Arabella saw that he was not likely
to do much work for a long while, and was cross enough at the turn
affairs had taken since her remarriage to him.  "I'm hanged if you
haven't been clever in this last stroke!" she would say, "to get a
nurse for nothing by marrying me!"

Jude was absolutely indifferent to what she said, and indeed, often
regarded her abuse in a humorous light.  Sometimes his mood was more
earnest, and as he lay he often rambled on upon the defeat of his
early aims.

"Every man has some little power in some one direction," he would
say.  "I was never really stout enough for the stone trade,
particularly the fixing.  Moving the blocks always used to strain
me, and standing the trying draughts in buildings before the windows
are in always gave me colds, and I think that began the mischief
inside.  But I felt I could do one thing if I had the opportunity.
I could accumulate ideas, and impart them to others.  I wonder if the
founders had such as I in their minds--a fellow good for nothing else
but that particular thing? ...  I hear that soon there is going to
be a better chance for such helpless students as I was.  There are
schemes afoot for making the university less exclusive, and extending
its influence.  I don't know much about it.  And it is too late, too
late for me!  Ah--and for how many worthier ones before me!"

"How you keep a-mumbling!" said Arabella.  "I should have thought
you'd have got over all that craze about books by this time.  And so
you would, if you'd had any sense to begin with.  You are as bad now
as when we were first married."

On one occasion while soliloquizing thus he called her "Sue"
unconsciously.

"I wish you'd mind who you are talking to!" said Arabella
indignantly.  "Calling a respectable married woman by the name of
that--"  She remembered herself and he did not catch the word.

But in the course of time, when she saw how things were going, and
how very little she had to fear from Sue's rivalry, she had a fit of
generosity.  "I suppose you want to see your--Sue?" she said.  "Well,
I don't mind her coming.  You can have her here if you like."

"I don't wish to see her again."

"Oh--that's a change!"

"And don't tell her anything about me--that I'm ill, or anything.
She has chosen her course.  Let her go!"

One day he received a surprise.  Mrs. Edlin came to see him, quite
on her own account.  Jude's wife, whose feelings as to where his
affections were centred had reached absolute indifference by
this time, went out, leaving the old woman alone with Jude.  He
impulsively asked how Sue was, and then said bluntly, remembering
what Sue had told him: "I suppose they are still only husband and
wife in name?"

Mrs. Edlin hesitated.  "Well, no--it's different now.  She's begun it
quite lately--all of her own free will."

"When did she begin?" he asked quickly.

"The night after you came.  But as a punishment to her poor self.
He didn't wish it, but she insisted."

"Sue, my Sue--you darling fool--this is almost more than I can
endure! ...  Mrs. Edlin--don't be frightened at my rambling--I've
got to talk to myself lying here so many hours alone--she was once
a woman whose intellect was to mine like a star to a benzoline lamp:
who saw all MY superstitions as cobwebs that she could brush away
with a word.  Then bitter affliction came to us, and her intellect
broke, and she veered round to darkness.  Strange difference of sex,
that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men,
narrow the views of women almost invariably.  And now the ultimate
horror has come--her giving herself like this to what she loathes, in
her enslavement to forms!  She, so sensitive, so shrinking, that the
very wind seemed to blow on her with a touch of deference...  As for
Sue and me when we were at our own best, long ago--when our minds
were clear, and our love of truth fearless--the time was not ripe
for us!  Our ideas were fifty years too soon to be any good to us.
And so the resistance they met with brought reaction in her, and
recklessness and ruin on me! ...  There--this, Mrs. Edlin, is how
I go on to myself continually, as I lie here.  I must be boring you
awfully."

"Not at all, my dear boy.  I could hearken to 'ee all day."

As Jude reflected more and more on her news, and grew more restless,
he began in his mental agony to use terribly profane language about
social conventions, which started a fit of coughing.  Presently there
came a knock at the door downstairs.  As nobody answered it Mrs.
Edlin herself went down.

The visitor said blandly: "The Doctor."  The lanky form was that of
Physician Vilbert, who had been called in by Arabella.

"How is my patient at present?" asked the physician.

"Oh bad--very bad!  Poor chap, he got excited, and do blaspeam
terribly, since I let out some gossip by accident--the more to my
blame.  But there--you must excuse a man in suffering for what he
says, and I hope God will forgive him."

"Ah.  I'll go up and see him.  Mrs. Fawley at home?"

"She's not in at present, but she'll be here soon."

Vilbert went; but though Jude had hitherto taken the medicines of
that skilful practitioner with the greatest indifference whenever
poured down his throat by Arabella, he was now so brought to bay by
events that he vented his opinion of Vilbert in the physician's face,
and so forcibly, and with such striking epithets, that Vilbert soon
scurried downstairs again.  At the door he met Arabella, Mrs. Edlin
having left.  Arabella inquired how he thought her husband was
now, and seeing that the Doctor looked ruffled, asked him to take
something.  He assented.

"I'll bring it to you here in the passage," she said.  "There's
nobody but me about the house to-day."

She brought him a bottle and a glass, and he drank.

Arabella began shaking with suppressed laughter.  "What is this, my
dear?" he asked, smacking his lips.

"Oh--a drop of wine--and something in it."  Laughing again she said:
"I poured your own love-philtre into it, that you sold me at the
agricultural show, don't you re-member?"

"I do, I do!  Clever woman!  But you must be prepared for the
consequences."  Putting his arm round her shoulders he kissed her
there and then.

"Don't don't," she whispered, laughing good-humouredly. "My man will
hear."

She let him out of the house, and as she went back she said to
herself: "Well!  Weak women must provide for a rainy day.  And if my
poor fellow upstairs do go off--as I suppose he will soon--it's well
to keep chances open.  And I can't pick and choose now as I could
when I was younger.  And one must take the old if one can't get the
young."

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

completion: Jude recovers temporarily, but after Christmas, his health begins to decline again. Arabella is irritated at having to nurse him. But once she realizes he is seriously ill, she offers to send for Sue. Jude protests that Sue has chosen her own course and that he does not want to see her again. However, some days later, Mrs. Edlin comes to visit him, and Jude inquires about Sue. Mrs. Edlin reveals that Sue and Phillotson are now living as man and wife, ever since Jude's visit to Marygreen. Jude is horrified. He realizes Sue is doing this as a penance. He recalls the good times they shared and the great changes they have gone through. Then he speaks bitterly of the conventions of society, which have brought this ruin on them. As he grows more and more restless, he is overcome by a fit of coughing. Physician Vilbert calls on him, but Jude is enraged at his appearance and insults him. On his way out Vilbert meets Arabella, who offers him some wine into which she has mixed the "love philter" she bought from him at the agricultural show. She allows Vilbert to kiss her and flirts with him.


prompt:
Chapter: The last pages to which the chronicler of these lives would ask the
reader's attention are concerned with the scene in and out of Jude's
bedroom when leafy summer came round again.

His face was now so thin that his old friends would hardly have known
him.  It was afternoon, and Arabella was at the looking-glass curling
her hair, which operation she performed by heating an umbrella-stay
in the flame of a candle she had lighted, and using it upon the
flowing lock.  When she had finished this, practised a dimple, and
put on her things, she cast her eyes round upon Jude.  He seemed to
be sleeping, though his position was an elevated one, his malady
preventing him lying down.

Arabella, hatted, gloved, and ready, sat down and waited, as if
expecting some one to come and take her place as nurse.

Certain sounds from without revealed that the town was in festivity,
though little of the festival, whatever it might have been, could be
seen here.  Bells began to ring, and the notes came into the room
through the open window, and travelled round Jude's head in a hum.
They made her restless, and at last she said to herself: "Why ever
doesn't Father come?"

She looked again at Jude, critically gauged his ebbing life, as she
had done so many times during the late months, and glancing at his
watch, which was hung up by way of timepiece, rose impatiently.
Still he slept, and coming to a resolution she slipped from the room,
closed the door noiselessly, and descended the stairs.  The house
was empty.  The attraction which moved Arabella to go abroad had
evidently drawn away the other inmates long before.

It was a warm, cloudless, enticing day.  She shut the front door, and
hastened round into Chief Street, and when near the theatre could
hear the notes of the organ, a rehearsal for a coming concert being
in progress.  She entered under the archway of Oldgate College, where
men were putting up awnings round the quadrangle for a ball in the
hall that evening.  People who had come up from the country for the
day were picnicking on the grass, and Arabella walked along the
gravel paths and under the aged limes.  But finding this place rather
dull she returned to the streets, and watched the carriages drawing
up for the concert, numerous Dons and their wives, and undergraduates
with gay female companions, crowding up likewise.  When the doors
were closed, and the concert began, she moved on.

The powerful notes of that concert rolled forth through the swinging
yellow blinds of the open windows, over the housetops, and into the
still air of the lanes.  They reached so far as to the room in which
Jude lay; and it was about this time that his cough began again and
awakened him.

As soon as he could speak he murmured, his eyes still closed: "A
little water, please."

Nothing but the deserted room received his appeal, and he coughed
to exhaustion again--saying still more feebly: "Water--some
water--Sue--Arabella!"

The room remained still as before.  Presently he gasped again:
"Throat--water--Sue--darling--drop of water--please--oh please!"

No water came, and the organ notes, faint as a bee's hum, rolled in
as before.

While he remained, his face changing, shouts and hurrahs came from
somewhere in the direction of the river.

"Ah--yes!  The Remembrance games," he murmured.  "And I here.  And
Sue defiled!"

The hurrahs were repeated, drowning the faint organ notes.  Jude's
face changed more: he whispered slowly, his parched lips scarcely
moving:

_"Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it
was said, There is a man-child conceived."_

("Hurrah!")

_"Let that day be darkness; let not God regard it from above, neither
let the light shine upon it.  Lo, let that night be solitary, let no
joyful voice come therein."_

("Hurrah!")

_"Why died I not from the womb?  Why did I not give up the ghost when
I came out of the belly? ...  For now should I have lain still and
been quiet.  I should have slept: then had I been at rest!"_

("Hurrah!")

_"There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the
oppressor...  The small and the great are there; and the servant is
free from his master.  Wherefore is light given to him that is in
misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?"_

Meanwhile Arabella, in her journey to discover what was going on,
took a short cut down a narrow street and through an obscure nook
into the quad of Cardinal.  It was full of bustle, and brilliant
in the sunlight with flowers and other preparations for a ball
here also.  A carpenter nodded to her, one who had formerly been a
fellow-workman of Jude's.  A corridor was in course of erection from
the entrance to the hall staircase, of gay red and buff bunting.
Waggon-loads of boxes containing bright plants in full bloom were
being placed about, and the great staircase was covered with red
cloth.  She nodded to one workman and another, and ascended to the
hall on the strength of their acquaintance, where they were putting
down a new floor and decorating for the dance.

The cathedral bell close at hand was sounding for five o'clock
service.

"I should not mind having a spin there with a fellow's arm round my
waist," she said to one of the men.  "But Lord, I must be getting
home again--there's a lot to do.  No dancing for me!"

When she reached home she was met at the door by Stagg, and one or
two other of Jude's fellow stoneworkers.  "We are just going down
to the river," said the former, "to see the boat-bumping.  But we've
called round on our way to ask how your husband is."

"He's sleeping nicely, thank you," said Arabella.

"That's right.  Well now, can't you give yourself half an hour's
relaxation, Mrs. Fawley, and come along with us?  'Twould do you
good."

"I should like to go," said she.  "I've never seen the boat-racing,
and I hear it is good fun."

"Come along!"

"How I WISH I could!"  She looked longingly down the street.  "Wait
a minute, then.  I'll just run up and see how he is now.  Father is
with him, I believe; so I can most likely come."

They waited, and she entered.  Downstairs the inmates were absent
as before, having, in fact, gone in a body to the river where the
procession of boats was to pass.  When she reached the bedroom she
found that her father had not even now come.

"Why couldn't he have been here!" she said impatiently.  "He wants to
see the boats himself--that's what it is!"

However, on looking round to the bed she brightened, for she saw
that Jude was apparently sleeping, though he was not in the usual
half-elevated posture necessitated by his cough.  He had slipped
down, and lay flat.  A second glance caused her to start, and she
went to the bed.  His face was quite white, and gradually becoming
rigid.  She touched his fingers; they were cold, though his body was
still warm.  She listened at his chest.  All was still within.  The
bumping of near thirty years had ceased.

After her first appalled sense of what had happened, the faint notes
of a military or other brass band from the river reached her ears;
and in a provoked tone she exclaimed, "To think he should die just
now!  Why did he die just now!"  Then meditating another moment or
two she went to the door, softly closed it as before, and again
descended the stairs.

"Here she is!" said one of the workmen.  "We wondered if you were
coming after all.  Come along; we must be quick to get a good
place...  Well, how is he?  Sleeping well still?  Of course, we don't
want to drag 'ee away if--"

"Oh yes--sleeping quite sound.  He won't wake yet," she said
hurriedly.

They went with the crowd down Cardinal Street, where they presently
reached the bridge, and the gay barges burst upon their view.  Thence
they passed by a narrow slit down to the riverside path--now dusty,
hot, and thronged.  Almost as soon as they had arrived the grand
procession of boats began; the oars smacking with a loud kiss on the
face of the stream, as they were lowered from the perpendicular.

"Oh, I say--how jolly!  I'm glad I've come," said Arabella.  "And--it
can't hurt my husband--my being away."

On the opposite side of the river, on the crowded barges, were
gorgeous nosegays of feminine beauty, fashionably arrayed in green,
pink, blue, and white.  The blue flag of the boat club denoted the
centre of interest, beneath which a band in red uniform gave out the
notes she had already heard in the death-chamber.  Collegians of all
sorts, in canoes with ladies, watching keenly for "our" boat, darted
up and down.  While she regarded the lively scene somebody touched
Arabella in the ribs, and looking round she saw Vilbert.

"That philtre is operating, you know!" he said with a leer.  "Shame
on 'ee to wreck a heart so!"

"I shan't talk of love to-day."

"Why not?  It is a general holiday."

She did not reply.  Vilbert's arm stole round her waist, which act
could be performed unobserved in the crowd.  An arch expression
overspread Arabella's face at the feel of the arm, but she kept her
eyes on the river as if she did not know of the embrace.

The crowd surged, pushing Arabella and her friends sometimes nearly
into the river, and she would have laughed heartily at the horse-play
that succeeded, if the imprint on her mind's eye of a pale,
statuesque countenance she had lately gazed upon had not sobered her
a little.

The fun on the water reached the acme of excitement; there were
immersions, there were shouts: the race was lost and won, the pink
and blue and yellow ladies retired from the barges, and the people
who had watched began to move.

"Well--it's been awfully good," cried Arabella.  "But I think I must
get back to my poor man.  Father is there, so far as I know; but I
had better get back."

"What's your hurry?"

"Well, I must go...  Dear, dear, this is awkward!"

At the narrow gangway where the people ascended from the riverside
path to the bridge the crowd was literally jammed into one hot
mass--Arabella and Vilbert with the rest; and here they remained
motionless, Arabella exclaiming, "Dear, dear!" more and more
impatiently; for it had just occurred to her mind that if Jude were
discovered to have died alone an inquest might be deemed necessary.

"What a fidget you are, my love," said the physician, who, being
pressed close against her by the throng, had no need of personal
effort for contact.  "Just as well have patience: there's no getting
away yet!"

It was nearly ten minutes before the wedged multitude moved
sufficiently to let them pass through.  As soon as she got up
into the street Arabella hastened on, forbidding the physician to
accompany her further that day.  She did not go straight to her
house; but to the abode of a woman who performed the last necessary
offices for the poorer dead; where she knocked.

"My husband has just gone, poor soul," she said.  "Can you come and
lay him out?"

Arabella waited a few minutes; and the two women went along, elbowing
their way through the stream of fashionable people pouring out of
Cardinal meadow, and being nearly knocked down by the carriages.

"I must call at the sexton's about the bell, too," said Arabella.
"It is just round here, isn't it?  I'll meet you at my door."

By ten o'clock that night Jude was lying on the bedstead at his
lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an arrow.  Through the
partly opened window the joyous throb of a waltz entered from the
ball-room at Cardinal.

Two days later, when the sky was equally cloudless, and the air
equally still, two persons stood beside Jude's open coffin in the
same little bedroom.  On one side was Arabella, on the other the
Widow Edlin.  They were both looking at Jude's face, the worn old
eyelids of Mrs. Edlin being red.

"How beautiful he is!" said she.

"Yes.  He's a 'andsome corpse," said Arabella.

The window was still open to ventilate the room, and it being about
noontide the clear air was motionless and quiet without.  From a
distance came voices; and an apparent noise of persons stamping.

"What's that?" murmured the old woman.

"Oh, that's the Doctors in the theatre, conferring Honorary degrees
on the Duke of Hamptonshire and a lot more illustrious gents of that
sort.  It's Remembrance Week, you know.  The cheers come from the
young men."

"Aye; young and strong-lunged!  Not like our poor boy here."

An occasional word, as from some one making a speech, floated from
the open windows of the theatre across to this quiet corner, at which
there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features
of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and
Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neighbouring shelf,
and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with,
roughened with stone-dust where he had been in the habit of catching
them up for a few minutes between his labours, seemed to pale to a
sickly cast at the sounds.  The bells struck out joyously; and their
reverberations travelled round the bed-room.

Arabella's eyes removed from Jude to Mrs. Edlin.  "D'ye think she
will come?" she asked.

"I could not say.  She swore not to see him again."

"How is she looking?"

"Tired and miserable, poor heart.  Years and years older than when
you saw her last.  Quite a staid, worn woman now.  'Tis the man--she
can't stomach un, even now!"

"If Jude had been alive to see her, he would hardly have cared for
her any more, perhaps."

"That's what we don't know...  Didn't he ever ask you to send for
her, since he came to see her in that strange way?"

"No.  Quite the contrary.  I offered to send, and he said I was not
to let her know how ill he was."

"Did he forgive her?"

"Not as I know."

"Well--poor little thing, 'tis to be believed she's found forgiveness
somewhere!  She said she had found peace!

"She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace
till she's hoarse, but it won't be true!" said Arabella.  "She's
never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till
she's as he is now!"

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

completion: Jude's life has dragged on, and once again it is summer and Remembrance Day in Christminster. The weather is calm and the college festivities have begun. Arabella leaves Jude alone and goes out to see the celebration. The organ notes of the concert outside disturb Jude and he wakes up coughing. He realizes it is Remembrance Day and asks for water, but there is no one to attend to him. He quotes in great bitterness some verses from the Book of Job. Amidst the noise of celebrations outside, Jude dies alone and unattended. Meanwhile, Arabella is enjoying herself at the festival. She looks in to see how Jude is doing and when she realizes he is dead, she goes back to rejoin the celebrations, as she does not want to miss the fun of the boat races. She meets Vilbert, allows him to flirt with her and finally returns to make the arrangements for the funeral. Two days later, only Arabella and Mrs. Edlin are there to pay their last respects to Jude. Mrs. Edlin wonders if Sue will attend the funeral, since she had promised Phillotson never to see Jude again. Mrs. Edlin tells Arabella that Sue has aged a great deal since living with Phillotson as his wife, although she claims to have "found peace. Arabella declares that Jude never forgave Sue and that Sue will never have any peace until death.