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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

"What!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes you have," murmured she.

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

"But I guess it.  I know nearly."

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

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

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

"Why didn't you tell me before!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Prettier than I am, no doubt!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

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

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

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

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

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

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.

Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:

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

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

   JUDE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh--nothing!"

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

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

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

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

"That's the church," said Jude.

"Where I am going to be married?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know you do!" said Jude.

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

"No doubt you will!"

"Was it like this when you were married?"

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

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

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

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

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

"How?" said Phillotson curiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

completion: In his new position at Shaston Phillotson, though pursuing his work at the school as well as his interest in antiquities, thinks mostly of Sue: saving money to support his future marriage, rereading her letters, looking at photographs of her. Though for a while he has honored Sue's desire that he not visit her frequently at the training college in Melchester, he grows impatient and pays her a visit only to discover she has been expelled. Entering the nearby cathedral, he encounters Jude and from him discovers the truth about the alleged scandal as well as something of Jude's feelings for Sue. When Jude meets Sue, finding her evasive about whether she has seen Phillotson, he tells her of his marriage to Arabella. Sue is angry because he has thought of himself first in concealing his marriage and has caused her to allow him to love her, and she asks him how he can reconcile this with his religious beliefs. To Jude's insistence that his marriage is the only obstacle between them, she names several, among which is that she would have to love him. As a reason for not telling her of Arabella, Jude mentions the family's lucklessness in marriage, which momentarily frightens them both. They part, pretending they can still be friends. When Sue writes to Jude that she is going to marry Phillotson soon, Jude wonders if his revealing his marriage to Arabella has hastened her decision, as he feels his visiting her drunk hurried her engagement. Even more upsetting is a second letter asking Jude to give her away at the ceremony, with its mention of him as her nearest "married relation." At Jude's suggestion Sue comes to stay with him so as to marry from his house, and their behavior toward each other is strained. Certain that she is making a mistake in marrying Phillotson, Jude allows Sue to go into the church a few hours before the wedding to see the place where she is to be married, an odd request that she herself acknowledges is characteristic of her. This and, later, the wedding are painful to Jude, and he wonders if she has willfully wanted him to be present. After the wedding and a meal at Jude's lodgings, when the newly married couple are ready to leave Sue hurries back into the house for her handkerchief. She looks at Jude as if to speak but says nothing and hurries out.


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

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

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

Nobody had been there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not a sound," said she.

"Where is he?"

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

Jude's eyes grew rounder.

"What made you part from him?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh!"

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

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

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

"How long have you been here?"

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

"I wonder you came to this place!"

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

"Why did you return from Australia?"

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

"No."

"Not even a reverend?"

"No."

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

"I am as I was."

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

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

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

"True.  I am known here a little."

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

"What were they?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"As you like."

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

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

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: With Sue gone, Jude finds Melchester oppressive. News that his aunt is ill and an offer from his former employer at Christminster give him excuse to leave. Finding his aunt very ill indeed, he writes to Sue, suggesting she come and offering to meet her on his way back from Christminster. He finds it a city of ghosts and decides not to return there, but before leaving to meet Sue he goes into a tavern, the one where he recited the Creed, for a drink to relieve his depressed feelings. There he encounters Arabella, back from Australia, working as a barmaid. He agrees to meet her later, though it means missing the train and his meeting with Sue. When Jude has no ideas as to arrangements for their separation, at Arabella's suggestion they go to Aldbrickham and spend the night, giving themselves time, according to her, to decide what to do. Back in Christminster the next day, Arabella tells Jude she married again in Australia and when he is angry about this says she will go back to the other man if Jude won't have her. No sooner has he left Arabella than he encounters Sue, who has come to look for him, thinking he may have started drinking as the result of being in the city where so many of his hopes have been disappointed. They return to Marygreen together, and Jude tries unsuccessfully to find out about her marriage, convinced she is unhappy. But she will say nothing but good of Phillotson, and she is offended, later, when Aunt Drusilla makes derogatory remarks about marriage and about Phillotson as a husband. Out of her hearing, Sue admits to Jude she may have made a mistake but will not discuss the subject further. In the days after her departure Jude tries to discipline himself not to think of his love for her. While still at Marygreen, Jude gets a letter from Arabella announcing that she is joining her second husband in London and will help him run a tavern.


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: Back at Melchester, Jude tries to fight against the temptation to visit Sue at Shaston and tries desperately to pursue his study for the ministry. Enlarging his interest in sacred music and eventually joining a choir in a village church nearby, he is greatly moved by a new hymn and thinks that the composer of it must be the kind of man who would understand his own perplexing state of mind. Jude seeks out the composer but discovers he is interested only in money. Coming home from this trip, he discovers Sue has relented and asked him to visit on that very day. Abandoning his attempt to discipline his feelings for her, he writes to arrange to visit as soon as possible.