prompt:
Chapter: Necessary meditations on the actual, including the mean
bread-and-cheese question, dissipated the phantasmal for a while, and
compelled Jude to smother high thinkings under immediate needs.  He
had to get up, and seek for work, manual work; the only kind deemed
by many of its professors to be work at all.

Passing out into the streets on this errand he found that the
colleges had treacherously changed their sympathetic countenances:
some were pompous; some had put on the look of family vaults above
ground; something barbaric loomed in the masonries of all.  The
spirits of the great men had disappeared.

The numberless architectural pages around him he read, naturally,
less as an artist-critic of their forms than as an artizan and
comrade of the dead handicraftsmen whose muscles had actually
executed those forms.  He examined the mouldings, stroked them as
one who knew their beginning, said they were difficult or easy in
the working, had taken little or much time, were trying to the arm,
or convenient to the tool.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or
less defective real.  Cruelties, insults, had, he perceived, been
inflicted on the aged erections.  The condition of several moved him
as he would have been moved by maimed sentient beings.  They were
wounded, broken, sloughing off their outer shape in the deadly
struggle against years, weather, and man.

The rottenness of these historical documents reminded him that he was
not, after all, hastening on to begin the morning practically as he
had intended.  He had come to work, and to live by work, and the
morning had nearly gone.  It was, in one sense, encouraging to think
that in a place of crumbling stones there must be plenty for one of
his trade to do in the business of renovation.  He asked his way to
the workyard of the stone-mason whose name had been given him at
Alfredston; and soon heard the familiar sound of the rubbers and
chisels.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration.  Here, with keen edges
and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had
seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls.  These were the ideas in
modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry.
Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they
were new.  They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical.
How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.

He asked for the foreman, and looked round among the new traceries,
mullions, transoms, shafts, pinnacles, and battlements standing on
the bankers half worked, or waiting to be removed.  They were marked
by precision, mathematical straightness, smoothness, exactitude:
there in the old walls were the broken lines of the original idea;
jagged curves, disdain of precision, irregularity, disarray.

For a moment there fell on Jude a true illumination; that here in the
stone yard was a centre of effort as worthy as that dignified by the
name of scholarly study within the noblest of the colleges.  But he
lost it under stress of his old idea.  He would accept any employment
which might be offered him on the strength of his late employer's
recommendation; but he would accept it as a provisional thing only.
This was his form of the modern vice of unrest.

Moreover he perceived that at best only copying, patching and
imitating went on here; which he fancied to be owing to some
temporary and local cause.  He did not at that time see that
mediaevalism was as dead as a fern-leaf in a lump of coal; that other
developments were shaping in the world around him, in which Gothic
architecture and its associations had no place.  The deadly animosity
of contemporary logic and vision towards so much of what he held in
reverence was not yet revealed to him.

Having failed to obtain work here as yet he went away, and thought
again of his cousin, whose presence somewhere at hand he seemed to
feel in wavelets of interest, if not of emotion.  How he wished he
had that pretty portrait of her!  At last he wrote to his aunt to
send it.  She did so, with a request, however, that he was not to
bring disturbance into the family by going to see the girl or her
relations.  Jude, a ridiculously affectionate fellow, promised
nothing, put the photograph on the mantel-piece, kissed it--he did
not know why--and felt more at home.  She seemed to look down and
preside over his tea.  It was cheering--the one thing uniting him to
the emotions of the living city.

There remained the schoolmaster--probably now a reverend parson.
But he could not possibly hunt up such a respectable man just yet;
so raw and unpolished was his condition, so precarious were his
fortunes.  Thus he still remained in loneliness.  Although people
moved round him he virtually saw none.  Not as yet having mingled
with the active life of the place it was largely non-existent to him.
But the saints and prophets in the window-tracery, the paintings
in the galleries, the statues, the busts, the gargoyles, the
corbel-heads--these seemed to breathe his atmosphere.  Like all
newcomers to a spot on which the past is deeply graven he heard that
past announcing itself with an emphasis altogether unsuspected by,
and even incredible to, the habitual residents.

For many days he haunted the cloisters and quadrangles of the
colleges at odd minutes in passing them, surprised by impish
echoes of his own footsteps, smart as the blows of a mallet.  The
Christminster "sentiment," as it had been called, ate further and
further into him; till he probably knew more about those buildings
materially, artistically, and historically, than any one of their
inmates.

It was not till now, when he found himself actually on the spot of
his enthusiasm, that Jude perceived how far away from the object of
that enthusiasm he really was.  Only a wall divided him from those
happy young contemporaries of his with whom he shared a common mental
life; men who had nothing to do from morning till night but to read,
mark, learn, and inwardly digest.  Only a wall--but what a wall!

Every day, every hour, as he went in search of labour, he saw them
going and coming also, rubbed shoulders with them, heard their
voices, marked their movements.  The conversation of some of the
more thoughtful among them seemed oftentimes, owing to his long and
persistent preparation for this place, to be peculiarly akin to his
own thoughts.  Yet he was as far from them as if he had been at the
antipodes.  Of course he was.  He was a young workman in a white
blouse, and with stone-dust in the creases of his clothes; and in
passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather saw
through him as through a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.
Whatever they were to him, he to them was not on the spot at all; and
yet he had fancied he would be close to their lives by coming there.

But the future lay ahead after all; and if he could only be so
fortunate as to get into good employment he would put up with the
inevitable.  So he thanked God for his health and strength, and took
courage.  For the present he was outside the gates of everything,
colleges included: perhaps some day he would be inside.  Those
palaces of light and leading; he might some day look down on the
world through their panes.

At length he did receive a message from the stone-mason's yard--that
a job was waiting for him.  It was his first encouragement, and he
closed with the offer promptly.

He was young and strong, or he never could have executed with such
zest the undertakings to which he now applied himself, since they
involved reading most of the night after working all the day.  First
he bought a shaded lamp for four and six-pence, and obtained a good
light.  Then he got pens, paper, and such other necessary books as he
had been unable to obtain elsewhere.  Then, to the consternation of
his landlady, he shifted all the furniture of his room--a single one
for living and sleeping--rigged up a curtain on a rope across the
middle, to make a double chamber out of one, hung up a thick blind
that nobody should know how he was curtailing the hours of sleep,
laid out his books, and sat down.

Having been deeply encumbered by marrying, getting a cottage, and
buying the furniture which had disappeared in the wake of his wife,
he had never been able to save any money since the time of those
disastrous ventures, and till his wages began to come in he was
obliged to live in the narrowest way.  After buying a book or two
he could not even afford himself a fire; and when the nights reeked
with the raw and cold air from the Meadows he sat over his lamp in
a great-coat, hat, and woollen gloves.

From his window he could perceive the spire of the cathedral, and the
ogee dome under which resounded the great bell of the city.  The tall
tower, tall belfry windows, and tall pinnacles of the college by the
bridge he could also get a glimpse of by going to the staircase.
These objects he used as stimulants when his faith in the future was
dim.

Like enthusiasts in general he made no inquiries into details of
procedure.  Picking up general notions from casual acquaintance, he
never dwelt upon them.  For the present, he said to himself, the one
thing necessary was to get ready by accumulating money and knowledge,
and await whatever chances were afforded to such an one of becoming
a son of the University.  "For wisdom is a defence, and money is a
defence; but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life
to them that have it."  His desire absorbed him, and left no part of
him to weigh its practicability.

At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor old
aunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her--a fear that
Jude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his cousin
Sue Bridehead and her relations.  Sue's father, his aunt believed,
had gone back to London, but the girl remained at Christminster.  To
make her still more objectionable, she was an artist or designer of
some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical warehouse, which was
a perfect seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no doubt abandoned to
mummeries on that account--if not quite a Papist. (Miss Drusilla
Fawley was of her date, Evangelical.)

As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, this
news of Sue's probable opinions did not much influence him one way or
the other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly interesting.
With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his earliest spare
minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt's description; and
beheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a desk, who was
suspiciously like the original of the portrait.  He ventured to enter
on a trivial errand, and having made his purchase lingered on the
scene.  The shop seemed to be kept entirely by women.  It contained
Anglican books, stationery, texts, and fancy goods: little plaster
angels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of saints, ebony crosses
that were almost crucifixes, prayer-books that were almost missals.
He felt very shy of looking at the girl in the desk; she was so
pretty that he could not believe it possible that she should belong
to him.  Then she spoke to one of the two older women behind the
counter; and he recognized in the accents certain qualities of his
own voice; softened and sweetened, but his own.  What was she doing?
He stole a glance round.  Before her lay a piece of zinc, cut to
the shape of a scroll three or four feet long, and coated with a
dead-surface paint on one side.  Hereon she was designing or
illuminating, in characters of Church text, the single word

   A L L E L U J A

"A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers!" thought he.

Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her skill in
work of this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father's
occupation as an ecclesiastical worker in metal.  The lettering on
which she was engaged was clearly intended to be fixed up in some
chancel to assist devotion.

He came out.  It would have been easy to speak to her there and then,
but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to disregard her
request so incontinently.  She had used him roughly, but she had
brought him up: and the fact of her being powerless to control him
lent a pathetic force to a wish that would have been inoperative as
an argument.

So Jude gave no sign.  He would not call upon Sue just yet.  He had
other reasons against doing so when he had walked away.  She seemed
so dainty beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty
trousers that he felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he
had felt about Mr. Phillotson.  And how possible it was that she had
inherited the antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as
far as a Christian could, particularly when he had told her that
unpleasant part of his history which had resulted in his becoming
enchained to one of her own sex whom she would certainly not admire.

Thus he kept watch over her, and liked to feel she was there.
The consciousness of her living presence stimulated him.  But she
remained more or less an ideal character, about whose form he began
to weave curious and fantastic day-dreams.

Between two and three weeks afterwards Jude was engaged with some
more men, outside Crozier College in Old-time Street, in getting a
block of worked freestone from a waggon across the pavement, before
hoisting it to the parapet which they were repairing.  Standing in
position the head man said, "Spaik when he heave! He-ho!"  And they
heaved.

All of a sudden, as he lifted, his cousin stood close to his elbow,
pausing a moment on the bend of her foot till the obstructing object
should have been removed.  She looked right into his face with
liquid, untranslatable eyes, that combined, or seemed to him to
combine, keenness with tenderness, and mystery with both, their
expression, as well as that of her lips, taking its life from some
words just spoken to a companion, and being carried on into his face
quite unconsciously.  She no more observed his presence than that of
the dust-motes which his manipulations raised into the sunbeams.

His closeness to her was so suggestive that he trembled, and turned
his face away with a shy instinct to prevent her recognizing him,
though as she had never once seen him she could not possibly do so;
and might very well never have heard even his name.  He could
perceive that though she was a country-girl at bottom, a latter
girlhood of some years in London, and a womanhood here, had taken
all rawness out of her.

When she was gone he continued his work, reflecting on her.  He had
been so caught by her influence that he had taken no count of her
general mould and build.  He remembered now that she was not a large
figure, that she was light and slight, of the type dubbed elegant.
That was about all he had seen.  There was nothing statuesque in her;
all was nervous motion.  She was mobile, living, yet a painter might
not have called her handsome or beautiful.  But the much that she was
surprised him.  She was quite a long way removed from the rusticity
that was his.  How could one of his cross-grained, unfortunate,
almost accursed stock, have contrived to reach this pitch of
niceness?  London had done it, he supposed.

From this moment the emotion which had been accumulating in his
breast as the bottled-up effect of solitude and the poetized
locality he dwelt in, insensibly began to precipitate itself on this
half-visionary form; and he perceived that, whatever his obedient
wish in a contrary direction, he would soon be unable to resist the
desire to make himself known to her.

He affected to think of her quite in a family way, since there were
crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any
other.

The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong.
The second was that they were cousins.  It was not well for cousins
to fall in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion.
The third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage
usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would
duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be
intensified to a tragic horror.

Therefore, again, he would have to think of Sue with only a
relation's mutual interest in one belonging to him; regard her in
a practical way as some one to be proud of; to talk and nod to;
later on, to be invited to tea by, the emotion spent on her being
rigorously that of a kinsman and well-wisher.  So would she be to him
a kindly star, an elevating power, a companion in Anglican worship,
a tender friend.

But under the various deterrent influences Jude's instinct was to
approach her timidly, and the next Sunday he went to the morning
service in the Cathedral church of Cardinal College to gain a further
view of her, for he had found that she frequently attended there.

She did not come, and he awaited her in the afternoon, which was
finer.  He knew that if she came at all she would approach the
building along the eastern side of the great green quadrangle from
which it was accessible, and he stood in a corner while the bell was
going.  A few minutes before the hour for service she appeared as
one of the figures walking along under the college walls, and at
sight of her he advanced up the side opposite, and followed her into
the building, more than ever glad that he had not as yet revealed
himself.  To see her, and to be himself unseen and unknown, was
enough for him at present.

He lingered awhile in the vestibule, and the service was some way
advanced when he was put into a seat.  It was a louring, mournful,
still afternoon, when a religion of some sort seems a necessity to
ordinary practical men, and not only a luxury of the emotional
and leisured classes.  In the dim light and the baffling glare of
the clerestory windows he could discern the opposite worshippers
indistinctly only, but he saw that Sue was among them.  He had not
long discovered the exact seat that she occupied when the chanting
of the 119th Psalm in which the choir was engaged reached its second
part, _In quo corriget_, the organ changing to a pathetic Gregorian
tune as the singers gave forth:

   Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?

It was the very question that was engaging Jude's attention at this
moment.  What a wicked worthless fellow he had been to give vent as
he had done to an animal passion for a woman, and allow it to lead
to such disastrous consequences; then to think of putting an end to
himself; then to go recklessly and get drunk.  The great waves of
pedal music tumbled round the choir, and, nursed on the supernatural
as he had been, it is not wonderful that he could hardly believe that
the psalm was not specially set by some regardful Providence for this
moment of his first entry into the solemn building.  And yet it was
the ordinary psalm for the twenty-fourth evening of the month.

The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary
tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those
which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him.
She was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and
soul in church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had,
no doubt, much in common with him.  To an impressionable and lonely
young man the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for
his thoughts, which promised to supply both social and spiritual
possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout
the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.

Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him
that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.

Jude waited till she had left her seat and passed under the screen
before he himself moved.  She did not look towards him, and by the
time he reached the door she was half-way down the broad path.
Being dressed up in his Sunday suit he was inclined to follow her
and reveal himself.  But he was not quite ready; and, alas, ought
he to do so with the kind of feeling that was awakening in him?

For though it had seemed to have an ecclesiastical basis during the
service, and he had persuaded himself that such was the case, he
could not altogether be blind to the real nature of the magnetism.
She was such a stranger that the kinship was affectation, and he
said, "It can't be!  I, a man with a wife, must not know her!"  Still
Sue WAS his own kin, and the fact of his having a wife, even though
she was not in evidence in this hemisphere, might be a help in one
sense.  It would put all thought of a tender wish on his part out
of Sue's mind, and make her intercourse with him free and fearless.
It was with some heartache that he saw how little he cared for the
freedom and fearlessness that would result in her from such
knowledge.

Some little time before the date of this service in the cathedral the
pretty, liquid-eyed, light-footed young woman, Sue Bridehead, had an
afternoon's holiday, and leaving the ecclesiastical establishment in
which she not only assisted but lodged, took a walk into the country
with a book in her hand.  It was one of those cloudless days which
sometimes occur in Wessex and elsewhere between days of cold and wet,
as if intercalated by caprice of the weather-god.  She went along for
a mile or two until she came to much higher ground than that of the
city she had left behind her.  The road passed between green fields,
and coming to a stile Sue paused there, to finish the page she was
reading, and then looked back at the towers and domes and pinnacles
new and old.

On the other side of the stile, in the footpath, she beheld a
foreigner with black hair and a sallow face, sitting on the grass
beside a large square board whereon were fixed, as closely as they
could stand, a number of plaster statuettes, some of them bronzed,
which he was re-arranging before proceeding with them on his way.
They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and
comprised divinities of a very different character from those the
girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a Venus of
standard pattern, a Diana, and, of the other sex, Apollo, Bacchus,
and Mars.  Though the figures were many yards away from her the
south-west sun brought them out so brilliantly against the green
herbage that she could discern their contours with luminous
distinctness; and being almost in a line between herself and the
church towers of the city they awoke in her an oddly foreign and
contrasting set of ideas by comparison.  The man rose, and, seeing
her, politely took off his cap, and cried, "I-i-i-mages!" in an accent
that agreed with his appearance.  In a moment he dexterously lifted
upon his knee the great board with its assembled notabilities divine
and human, and raised it to the top of his head, bringing them on to
her and resting the board on the stile.  First he offered her his
smaller wares--the busts of kings and queens, then a minstrel, then
a winged Cupid.  She shook her head.

"How much are these two?" she said, touching with her finger the
Venus and the Apollo--the largest figures on the tray.

He said she should have them for ten shillings.

"I cannot afford that," said Sue.  She offered considerably less,
and to her surprise the image-man drew them from their wire stay and
handed them over the stile.  She clasped them as treasures.

When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be
concerned as to what she should do with them.  They seemed so very
large now that they were in her possession, and so very naked.
Being of a nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise.
When she handled them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and
jacket.  After carrying them along a little way openly an idea came
to her, and, pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other
rank growths from the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she
could in these, so that what she carried appeared to be an enormous
armful of green stuff gathered by a zealous lover of nature.

"Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!" she
said.  But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to
wish she had not bought the figures.

Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus's arm was
not broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian
city in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main
one, and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to
which she was attached.  Her purchases were taken straight up to her
own chamber, and she at once attempted to lock them in a box that was
her very own property; but finding them too cumbersome she wrapped
them in large sheets of brown paper, and stood them on the floor in a
corner.

The mistress of the house, Miss Fontover, was an elderly lady in
spectacles, dressed almost like an abbess; a dab at Ritual, as become
one of her business, and a worshipper at the ceremonial church of St.
Silas, in the suburb of Beersheba before-mentioned, which Jude also
had begun to attend.  She was the daughter of a clergyman in reduced
circumstances, and at his death, which had occurred several years
before this date, she boldly avoided penury by taking over a little
shop of church requisites and developing it to its present creditable
proportions.  She wore a cross and beads round her neck as her only
ornament, and knew the Christian Year by heart.

She now came to call Sue to tea, and, finding that the girl did not
respond for a moment, entered the room just as the other was hastily
putting a string round each parcel.

"Something you have been buying, Miss Bridehead?" she asked,
regarding the enwrapped objects.

"Yes--just something to ornament my room," said Sue.

"Well, I should have thought I had put enough here already," said
Miss Fontover, looking round at the Gothic-framed prints of saints,
the Church-text scrolls, and other articles which, having become too
stale to sell, had been used to furnish this obscure chamber.  "What
is it?  How bulky!"  She tore a little hole, about as big as a wafer,
in the brown paper, and tried to peep in.  "Why, statuary?  Two
figures?  Where did you get them?"

"Oh--I bought them of a travelling man who sells casts--"

"Two saints?"

"Yes."

"What ones?"

"St. Peter and St.--St. Mary Magdalen."

"Well--now come down to tea, and go and finish that organ-text, if
there's light enough afterwards."

These little obstacles to the indulgence of what had been the merest
passing fancy created in Sue a great zest for unpacking her objects
and looking at them; and at bedtime, when she was sure of being
undisturbed, she unrobed the divinities in comfort.  Placing the pair
of figures on the chest of drawers, a candle on each side of them,
she withdrew to the bed, flung herself down thereon, and began
reading a book she had taken from her box, which Miss Fontover knew
nothing of.  It was a volume of Gibbon, and she read the chapter
dealing with the reign of Julian the Apostate.  Occasionally she
looked up at the statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place,
there happening to be a Calvary print hanging between them, and,
as if the scene suggested the action, she at length jumped up and
withdrew another book from her box--a volume of verse--and turned to
the familiar poem--

   Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:
   The world has grown grey from thy breath!

which she read to the end.  Presently she put out the candles,
undressed, and finally extinguished her own light.

She was of an age which usually sleeps soundly, yet to-night she
kept waking up, and every time she opened her eyes there was enough
diffused light from the street to show her the white plaster figures,
standing on the chest of drawers in odd contrast to their environment
of text and martyr, and the Gothic-framed Crucifix-picture that was
only discernible now as a Latin cross, the figure thereon being
obscured by the shades.

On one of these occasions the church clocks struck some small hour.
It fell upon the ears of another person who sat bending over his
books at a not very distant spot in the same city.  Being Saturday
night the morrow was one on which Jude had not set his alarm-clock to
call him at his usually early time, and hence he had stayed up, as
was his custom, two or three hours later than he could afford to do
on any other day of the week.  Just then he was earnestly reading
from his Griesbach's text.  At the very time that Sue was tossing and
staring at her figures, the policeman and belated citizens passing
along under his window might have heard, if they had stood still,
strange syllables mumbled with fervour within--words that had for
Jude an indescribable enchantment: inexplicable sounds something
like these:--

"_All hemin heis Theos ho Pater, ex hou ta panta, kai hemeis eis
auton:_"

Till the sounds rolled with reverent loudness, as a book was heard
to close:--

"_Kai heis Kurios Iesous Christos, di hou ta panta kai hemeis di
autou!_"

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

completion: Jude's first concern is a job, though his working is to be done only as a way of supporting himself until he can enter the university. He goes to apply to a stonemason recommended by his employer in Alfredston. While there, he notices that the workmen are doing only copying and patching, not realizing that medieval building is coming to an end. He decides, while waiting to hear about the job, not to look up either Sue or Phillotson as yet. Now actually in Christminster he sees how really far away he is from realizing his dream, but he takes the job when offered and sets to work studying late into the night, as before not knowing what the best way is to go about it. By means of word from his aunt he comes upon Sue working in an ecclesiastical warehouse; though he is struck by her appearance and the work she is doing he doesn't speak to her. Nor does he when he sees her on the street. He decides he must think of Sue only as a relative for several reasons: he is married; it is not good for cousins to fall in love; and the family's bad luck in marriage would be even worse with a blood relative. Though Jude sees Sue at a church service, at the moment feeling repentant of his sensual interest in Arabella, he does not reveal himself to her because he isn't sure of his motives for wanting to know her. Earlier than this incident, while on an afternoon's holiday Sue has bought plaster reproductions of statues of Venus and Apollo. Once home with them -- she lives where she works -- she doesn't know how to conceal them from the very pious woman who is both her employer and landlady. When the lady sees them wrapped in a corner of her room, Sue refers to them as saints. Alone in her room later, she places the figures on a chest of drawers in front of a print of a crucifixion, from time to time looking up at them from her copy of Gibbon. In another part of the city Jude is earnestly reading his Greek Testament.


prompt:
Chapter: He was a handy man at his trade, an all-round man, as artizans in
country-towns are apt to be.  In London the man who carves the boss
or knob of leafage declines to cut the fragment of moulding which
merges in that leafage, as if it were a degradation to do the second
half of one whole.  When there was not much Gothic moulding for
Jude to run, or much window-tracery on the bankers, he would go out
lettering monuments or tombstones, and take a pleasure in the change
of handiwork.

The next time that he saw her was when he was on a ladder executing
a job of this sort inside one of the churches.  There was a short
morning service, and when the parson entered Jude came down from his
ladder, and sat with the half-dozen people forming the congregation,
till the prayer should be ended, and he could resume his tapping.  He
did not observe till the service was half over that one of the women
was Sue, who had perforce accompanied the elderly Miss Fontover
thither.

Jude sat watching her pretty shoulders, her easy, curiously
nonchalant risings and sittings, and her perfunctory genuflexions,
and thought what a help such an Anglican would have been to him in
happier circumstances.  It was not so much his anxiety to get on with
his work that made him go up to it immediately the worshipers began
to take their leave: it was that he dared not, in this holy spot,
confront the woman who was beginning to influence him in such an
indescribable manner.  Those three enormous reasons why he must
not attempt intimate acquaintance with Sue Bridehead, now that his
interest in her had shown itself to be unmistakably of a sexual kind,
loomed as stubbornly as ever.  But it was also obvious that man could
not live by work alone; that the particular man Jude, at any rate,
wanted something to love.  Some men would have rushed incontinently
to her, snatched the pleasure of easy friendship which she could
hardly refuse, and have left the rest to chance.  Not so Jude--at
first.

But as the days, and still more particularly the lonely evenings,
dragged along, he found himself, to his moral consternation,
to be thinking more of her instead of thinking less of her, and
experiencing a fearful bliss in doing what was erratic, informal, and
unexpected.  Surrounded by her influence all day, walking past the
spots she frequented, he was always thinking of her, and was obliged
to own to himself that his conscience was likely to be the loser in
this battle.

To be sure she was almost an ideality to him still.  Perhaps to know
her would be to cure himself of this unexpected and unauthorized
passion.  A voice whispered that, though he desired to know her, he
did not desire to be cured.

There was not the least doubt that from his own orthodox point of
view the situation was growing immoral.  For Sue to be the loved one
of a man who was licensed by the laws of his country to love Arabella
and none other unto his life's end, was a pretty bad second beginning
when the man was bent on such a course as Jude purposed.  This
conviction was so real with him that one day when, as was frequent,
he was at work in a neighbouring village church alone, he felt it to
be his duty to pray against his weakness.  But much as he wished to
be an exemplar in these things he could not get on.  It was quite
impossible, he found, to ask to be delivered from temptation when
your heart's desire was to be tempted unto seventy times seven.  So
he excused himself.  "After all," he said, "it is not altogether
an _erotolepsy_ that is the matter with me, as at that first time.
I can see that she is exceptionally bright; and it is partly a wish
for intellectual sympathy, and a craving for loving-kindness in my
solitude."  Thus he went on adoring her, fearing to realize that
it was human perversity.  For whatever Sue's virtues, talents, or
ecclesiastical saturation, it was certain that those items were not
at all the cause of his affection for her.

On an afternoon at this time a young girl entered the stone-mason's
yard with some hesitation, and, lifting her skirts to avoid draggling
them in the white dust, crossed towards the office.

"That's a nice girl," said one of the men known as Uncle Joe.

"Who is she?" asked another.

"I don't know--I've seen her about here and there.  Why, yes, she's
the daughter of that clever chap Bridehead who did all the wrought
ironwork at St. Silas' ten years ago, and went away to London
afterwards.  I don't know what he's doing now--not much I fancy--as
she's come back here."

Meanwhile the young woman had knocked at the office door and asked if
Mr. Jude Fawley was at work in the yard.  It so happened that Jude
had gone out somewhere or other that afternoon, which information she
received with a look of disappointment, and went away immediately.
When Jude returned they told him, and described her, whereupon he
exclaimed, "Why--that's my cousin Sue!"

He looked along the street after her, but she was out of sight.  He
had no longer any thought of a conscientious avoidance of her, and
resolved to call upon her that very evening.  And when he reached
his lodging he found a note from her--a first note--one of those
documents which, simple and commonplace in themselves, are seen
retrospectively to have been pregnant with impassioned consequences.
The very unconsciousness of a looming drama which is shown in such
innocent first epistles from women to men, or _vice versa_, makes
them, when such a drama follows, and they are read over by the purple
or lurid light of it, all the more impressive, solemn, and in cases,
terrible.

Sue's was of the most artless and natural kind.  She addressed him
as her dear cousin Jude; said she had only just learnt by the merest
accident that he was living in Christminster, and reproached him with
not letting her know.  They might have had such nice times together,
she said, for she was thrown much upon herself, and had hardly any
congenial friend.  But now there was every probability of her soon
going away, so that the chance of companionship would be lost perhaps
for ever.

A cold sweat overspread Jude at the news that she was going away.
That was a contingency he had never thought of, and it spurred him
to write all the more quickly to her.  He would meet her that very
evening, he said, one hour from the time of writing, at the cross in
the pavement which marked the spot of the Martyrdoms.

When he had despatched the note by a boy he regretted that in his
hurry he should have suggested to her to meet him out of doors, when
he might have said he would call upon her.  It was, in fact, the
country custom to meet thus, and nothing else had occurred to him.
Arabella had been met in the same way, unfortunately, and it might
not seem respectable to a dear girl like Sue.  However, it could not
be helped now, and he moved towards the point a few minutes before
the hour, under the glimmer of the newly lighted lamps.

The broad street was silent, and almost deserted, although it was
not late.  He saw a figure on the other side, which turned out to
be hers, and they both converged towards the crossmark at the same
moment.  Before either had reached it she called out to him:

"I am not going to meet you just there, for the first time in my
life!  Come further on."

The voice, though positive and silvery, had been tremulous.  They
walked on in parallel lines, and, waiting her pleasure, Jude watched
till she showed signs of closing in, when he did likewise, the place
being where the carriers' carts stood in the daytime, though there
was none on the spot then.

"I am sorry that I asked you to meet me, and didn't call," began Jude
with the bashfulness of a lover.  "But I thought it would save time
if we were going to walk."

"Oh--I don't mind that," she said with the freedom of a friend.  "I
have really no place to ask anybody in to.  What I meant was that the
place you chose was so horrid--I suppose I ought not to say horrid--I
mean gloomy and inauspicious in its associations...  But isn't it
funny to begin like this, when I don't know you yet?"  She looked him
up and down curiously, though Jude did not look much at her.

"You seem to know me more than I know you," she added.

"Yes--I have seen you now and then."

"And you knew who I was, and didn't speak?  And now I am going away!"

"Yes.  That's unfortunate.  I have hardly any other friend.  I have,
indeed, one very old friend here somewhere, but I don't quite like
to call on him just yet.  I wonder if you know anything of him--Mr.
Phillotson?  A parson somewhere about the county I think he is."

"No--I only know of one Mr. Phillotson.  He lives a little way out in
the country, at Lumsdon.  He's a village schoolmaster."

"Ah!  I wonder if he's the same.  Surely it is impossible!  Only a
schoolmaster still!  Do you know his Christian name--is it Richard?"

"Yes--it is; I've directed books to him, though I've never seen him."

"Then he couldn't do it!"

Jude's countenance fell, for how could he succeed in an enterprise
wherein the great Phillotson had failed?  He would have had a day of
despair if the news had not arrived during his sweet Sue's presence,
but even at this moment he had visions of how Phillotson's failure in
the grand university scheme would depress him when she had gone.

"As we are going to take a walk, suppose we go and call upon him?"
said Jude suddenly.  "It is not late."

She agreed, and they went along up a hill, and through some prettily
wooded country.  Presently the embattled tower and square turret
of the church rose into the sky, and then the school-house. They
inquired of a person in the street if Mr. Phillotson was likely to
be at home, and were informed that he was always at home.  A knock
brought him to the school-house door, with a candle in his hand and a
look of inquiry on his face, which had grown thin and careworn since
Jude last set eyes on him.

That after all these years the meeting with Mr. Phillotson should be
of this homely complexion destroyed at one stroke the halo which had
surrounded the school-master's figure in Jude's imagination ever
since their parting.  It created in him at the same time a sympathy
with Phillotson as an obviously much chastened and disappointed man.
Jude told him his name, and said he had come to see him as an old
friend who had been kind to him in his youthful days.

"I don't remember you in the least," said the school-master
thoughtfully.  "You were one of my pupils, you say?  Yes, no doubt;
but they number so many thousands by this time of my life, and have
naturally changed so much, that I remember very few except the quite
recent ones."

"It was out at Marygreen," said Jude, wishing he had not come.

"Yes.  I was there a short time.  And is this an old pupil, too?"

"No--that's my cousin...  I wrote to you for some grammars, if you
recollect, and you sent them?"

"Ah--yes!--I do dimly recall that incident."

"It was very kind of you to do it.  And it was you who first started
me on that course.  On the morning you left Marygreen, when your
goods were on the waggon, you wished me good-bye, and said your
scheme was to be a university man and enter the Church--that a degree
was the necessary hall-mark of one who wanted to do anything as a
theologian or teacher."

"I remember I thought all that privately; but I wonder I did not keep
my own counsel.  The idea was given up years ago."

"I have never forgotten it.  It was that which brought me to this
part of the country, and out here to see you to-night."

"Come in," said Phillotson.  "And your cousin, too."

They entered the parlour of the school-house, where there was a lamp
with a paper shade, which threw the light down on three or four
books.  Phillotson took it off, so that they could see each other
better, and the rays fell on the nervous little face and vivacious
dark eyes and hair of Sue, on the earnest features of her cousin,
and on the schoolmaster's own maturer face and figure, showing him
to be a spare and thoughtful personage of five-and-forty, with a
thin-lipped, somewhat refined mouth, a slightly stooping habit, and
a black frock coat, which from continued frictions shone a little at
the shoulder-blades, the middle of the back, and the elbows.

The old friendship was imperceptibly renewed, the schoolmaster
speaking of his experiences, and the cousins of theirs.  He told them
that he still thought of the Church sometimes, and that though he
could not enter it as he had intended to do in former years he might
enter it as a licentiate.  Meanwhile, he said, he was comfortable in
his present position, though he was in want of a pupil-teacher.

They did not stay to supper, Sue having to be indoors before it grew
late, and the road was retraced to Christminster.  Though they had
talked of nothing more than general subjects, Jude was surprised to
find what a revelation of woman his cousin was to him.  She was so
vibrant that everything she did seemed to have its source in feeling.
An exciting thought would make her walk ahead so fast that he could
hardly keep up with her; and her sensitiveness on some points
was such that it might have been misread as vanity.  It was with
heart-sickness he perceived that, while her sentiments towards him
were those of the frankest friendliness only, he loved her more than
before becoming acquainted with her; and the gloom of the walk home
lay not in the night overhead, but in the thought of her departure.

"Why must you leave Christminster?" he said regretfully.  "How can
you do otherwise than cling to a city in whose history such men as
Newman, Pusey, Ward, Keble, loom so large!"

"Yes--they do.  Though how large do they loom in the history of the
world? ...  What a funny reason for caring to stay!  I should never
have thought of it!"  She laughed.

"Well--I must go," she continued.  "Miss Fontover, one of the
partners whom I serve, is offended with me, and I with her; and it
is best to go."

"How did that happen?"

"She broke some statuary of mine."

"Oh?  Wilfully?"

"Yes.  She found it in my room, and though it was my property she
threw it on the floor and stamped on it, because it was not according
to her taste, and ground the arms and the head of one of the figures
all to bits with her heel--a horrid thing!"

"Too Catholic-Apostolic for her, I suppose?  No doubt she called them
popish images and talked of the invocation of saints."

"No...  No, she didn't do that.  She saw the matter quite
differently."

"Ah!  Then I am surprised!"

"Yes.  It was for quite some other reason that she didn't like my
patron-saints.  So I was led to retort upon her; and the end of it
was that I resolved not to stay, but to get into an occupation in
which I shall be more independent."

"Why don't you try teaching again?  You once did, I heard."

"I never thought of resuming it; for I was getting on as an
art-designer."

"DO let me ask Mr. Phillotson to let you try your hand in his
school?  If you like it, and go to a training college, and become a
first-class certificated mistress, you get twice as large an income
as any designer or church artist, and twice as much freedom."

"Well--ask him.  Now I must go in.  Good-bye, dear Jude!  I am so
glad we have met at last.  We needn't quarrel because our parents
did, need we?"

Jude did not like to let her see quite how much he agreed with her,
and went his way to the remote street in which he had his lodging.

To keep Sue Bridehead near him was now a desire which operated
without regard of consequences, and the next evening he again set out
for Lumsdon, fearing to trust to the persuasive effects of a note
only.  The school-master was unprepared for such a proposal.

"What I rather wanted was a second year's transfer, as it is called,"
he said.  "Of course your cousin would do, personally; but she has
had no experience.  Oh--she has, has she?  Does she really think of
adopting teaching as a profession?"

Jude said she was disposed to do so, he thought, and his ingenious
arguments on her natural fitness for assisting Mr. Phillotson, of
which Jude knew nothing whatever, so influenced the schoolmaster that
he said he would engage her, assuring Jude as a friend that unless
his cousin really meant to follow on in the same course, and regarded
this step as the first stage of an apprenticeship, of which her
training in a normal school would be the second stage, her time would
be wasted quite, the salary being merely nominal.

The day after this visit Phillotson received a letter from Jude,
containing the information that he had again consulted his cousin,
who took more and more warmly to the idea of tuition; and that
she had agreed to come.  It did not occur for a moment to the
schoolmaster and recluse that Jude's ardour in promoting the
arrangement arose from any other feelings towards Sue than the
instinct of co-operation common among members of the same family.

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

completion: Once more Jude has the opportunity to reveal himself to Sue but does not, still troubled by the legitimacy of his interest in her. He wants to pray to be delivered from temptation, but his every desire is precisely to be so tempted. Finally, it occurs that Sue looks him up at work, he is not there at the time, she sends him a note, he replies immediately when she says she may leave Christminster that he will meet her the same evening, and they do meet. Phillotson is mentioned in conversation, and Jude discovers he is still but a schoolmaster in Lumsdon just outside the city. Jude and Sue walk out to call on Phillotson, and at first he does not remember Jude. Jude tells the older man that he is determined to follow his example, but Phillotson has given up his aspirations now except for the possibility of entering the church as a licentiate. Later as they walk back to the city, Sue explains why she plans to leave Christminster: her employer has seen her pagan statues and they have quarreled. Jude suggests she return to teaching, since Phillotson has said he needs help. Sue is interested, Jude convinces Phillotson to hire her if she is really interested, and Sue accepts the job.


prompt:
Chapter: The schoolmaster sat in his homely dwelling attached to the school,
both being modern erections; and he looked across the way at the old
house in which his teacher Sue had a lodging.  The arrangement had
been concluded very quickly.  A pupil-teacher who was to have been
transferred to Mr. Phillotson's school had failed him, and Sue had
been taken as stop-gap.  All such provisional arrangements as these
could only last till the next annual visit of H.M. Inspector, whose
approval was necessary to make them permanent.  Having taught for
some two years in London, though she had abandoned that vocation of
late, Miss Bridehead was not exactly a novice, and Phillotson thought
there would be no difficulty in retaining her services, which he
already wished to do, though she had only been with him three or four
weeks.  He had found her quite as bright as Jude had described her;
and what master-tradesman does not wish to keep an apprentice who
saves him half his labour?

It was a little over half-past eight o'clock in the morning and he
was waiting to see her cross the road to the school, when he would
follow.  At twenty minutes to nine she did cross, a light hat tossed
on her head; and he watched her as a curiosity.  A new emanation,
which had nothing to do with her skill as a teacher, seemed to
surround her this morning.  He went to the school also, and Sue
remained governing her class at the other end of the room, all day
under his eye.  She certainly was an excellent teacher.

It was part of his duty to give her private lessons in the evening,
and some article in the Code made it necessary that a respectable,
elderly woman should be present at these lessons when the teacher and
the taught were of different sexes.  Richard Phillotson thought of
the absurdity of the regulation in this case, when he was old enough
to be the girl's father; but he faithfully acted up to it; and sat
down with her in a room where Mrs. Hawes, the widow at whose house
Sue lodged, occupied herself with sewing.  The regulation was,
indeed, not easy to evade, for there was no other sitting-room in the
dwelling.

Sometimes as she figured--it was arithmetic that they were working
at--she would involuntarily glance up with a little inquiring smile
at him, as if she assumed that, being the master, he must perceive
all that was passing in her brain, as right or wrong.  Phillotson was
not really thinking of the arithmetic at all, but of her, in a novel
way which somehow seemed strange to him as preceptor.  Perhaps she
knew that he was thinking of her thus.

For a few weeks their work had gone on with a monotony which in
itself was a delight to him.  Then it happened that the children were
to be taken to Christminster to see an itinerant exhibition, in the
shape of a model of Jerusalem, to which schools were admitted at
a penny a head in the interests of education.  They marched along
the road two and two, she beside her class with her simple cotton
sunshade, her little thumb cocked up against its stem; and Phillotson
behind in his long dangling coat, handling his walking-stick
genteelly, in the musing mood which had come over him since her
arrival.  The afternoon was one of sun and dust, and when they
entered the exhibition room few people were present but themselves.
The model of the ancient city stood in the middle of the apartment,
and the proprietor, with a fine religious philanthropy written on his
features, walked round it with a pointer in his hand, showing the
young people the various quarters and places known to them by name
from reading their Bibles; Mount Moriah, the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
the City of Zion, the walls and the gates, outside one of which there
was a large mound like a tumulus, and on the mound a little white
cross.  The spot, he said, was Calvary.

"I think," said Sue to the schoolmaster, as she stood with him a
little in the background, "that this model, elaborate as it is, is a
very imaginary production.  How does anybody know that Jerusalem was
like this in the time of Christ?  I am sure this man doesn't."

"It is made after the best conjectural maps, based on actual visits
to the city as it now exists."

"I fancy we have had enough of Jerusalem," she said, "considering we
are not descended from the Jews.  There was nothing first-rate about
the place, or people, after all--as there was about Athens, Rome,
Alexandria, and other old cities."

"But my dear girl, consider what it is to us!"

She was silent, for she was easily repressed; and then perceived
behind the group of children clustered round the model a young man
in a white flannel jacket, his form being bent so low in his intent
inspection of the Valley of Jehoshaphat that his face was almost
hidden from view by the Mount of Olives.  "Look at your cousin Jude,"
continued the schoolmaster.  "He doesn't think we have had enough of
Jerusalem!"

"Ah--I didn't see him!" she cried in her quick, light voice.
"Jude--how seriously you are going into it!"

Jude started up from his reverie, and saw her.  "Oh--Sue!" he said,
with a glad flush of embarrassment.  "These are your school-children,
of course!  I saw that schools were admitted in the afternoons, and
thought you might come; but I got so deeply interested that I didn't
remember where I was.  How it carries one back, doesn't it!  I could
examine it for hours, but I have only a few minutes, unfortunately;
for I am in the middle of a job out here."

"Your cousin is so terribly clever that she criticizes it
unmercifully," said Phillotson, with good-humoured satire.  "She is
quite sceptical as to its correctness."

"No, Mr. Phillotson, I am not--altogether!  I hate to be what is
called a clever girl--there are too many of that sort now!" answered
Sue sensitively.  "I only meant--I don't know what I meant--except
that it was what you don't understand!"

"_I_ know your meaning," said Jude ardently (although he did not).
"And I think you are quite right."

"That's a good Jude--I know YOU believe in me!"  She impulsively
seized his hand, and leaving a reproachful look on the schoolmaster
turned away to Jude, her voice revealing a tremor which she herself
felt to be absurdly uncalled for by sarcasm so gentle.  She had not
the least conception how the hearts of the twain went out to her at
this momentary revelation of feeling, and what a complication she was
building up thereby in the futures of both.

The model wore too much of an educational aspect for the children not
to tire of it soon, and a little later in the afternoon they were all
marched back to Lumsdon, Jude returning to his work.  He watched the
juvenile flock in their clean frocks and pinafores, filing down the
street towards the country beside Phillotson and Sue, and a sad,
dissatisfied sense of being out of the scheme of the latters' lives
had possession of him.  Phillotson had invited him to walk out
and see them on Friday evening, when there would be no lessons to
give to Sue, and Jude had eagerly promised to avail himself of the
opportunity.

Meanwhile the scholars and teachers moved homewards, and the next
day, on looking on the blackboard in Sue's class, Phillotson was
surprised to find upon it, skilfully drawn in chalk, a perspective
view of Jerusalem, with every building shown in its place.

"I thought you took no interest in the model, and hardly looked at
it?" he said.

"I hardly did," said she, "but I remembered that much of it."

"It is more than I had remembered myself."

Her Majesty's school-inspector was at that time paying
"surprise-visits" in this neighbourhood to test the teaching
unawares; and two days later, in the middle of the morning lessons,
the latch of the door was softly lifted, and in walked my gentleman,
the king of terrors--to pupil-teachers.

To Mr. Phillotson the surprise was not great; like the lady in the
story, he had been played that trick too many times to be unprepared.
But Sue's class was at the further end of the room, and her back was
towards the entrance; the inspector therefore came and stood behind
her and watched her teaching some half-minute before she became aware
of his presence.  She turned, and realized that an oft-dreaded moment
had come.  The effect upon her timidity was such that she uttered a
cry of fright.  Phillotson, with a strange instinct of solicitude
quite beyond his control, was at her side just in time to prevent her
falling from faintness.  She soon recovered herself, and laughed;
but when the inspector had gone there was a reaction, and she was
so white that Phillotson took her into his room, and gave her some
brandy to bring her round.  She found him holding her hand.

"You ought to have told me," she gasped petulantly, "that one of the
inspector's surprise-visits was imminent!  Oh, what shall I do!  Now
he'll write and tell the managers that I am no good, and I shall be
disgraced for ever!"

"He won't do that, my dear little girl.  You are the best teacher
ever I had!"

He looked so gently at her that she was moved, and regretted that she
had upbraided him.  When she was better she went home.

Jude in the meantime had been waiting impatiently for Friday.  On
both Wednesday and Thursday he had been so much under the influence
of his desire to see her that he walked after dark some distance
along the road in the direction of the village, and, on returning to
his room to read, found himself quite unable to concentrate his mind
on the page.  On Friday, as soon as he had got himself up as he
thought Sue would like to see him, and made a hasty tea, he set
out, notwithstanding that the evening was wet.  The trees overhead
deepened the gloom of the hour, and they dripped sadly upon him,
impressing him with forebodings--illogical forebodings; for though he
knew that he loved her he also knew that he could not be more to her
than he was.

On turning the corner and entering the village the first sight that
greeted his eyes was that of two figures under one umbrella coming
out of the vicarage gate.  He was too far back for them to notice
him, but he knew in a moment that they were Sue and Phillotson.  The
latter was holding the umbrella over her head, and they had evidently
been paying a visit to the vicar--probably on some business connected
with the school work.  And as they walked along the wet and deserted
lane Jude saw Phillotson place his arm round the girl's waist;
whereupon she gently removed it; but he replaced it; and she let it
remain, looking quickly round her with an air of misgiving.  She did
not look absolutely behind her, and therefore did not see Jude, who
sank into the hedge like one struck with a blight.  There he remained
hidden till they had reached Sue's cottage and she had passed in,
Phillotson going on to the school hard by.

"Oh, he's too old for her--too old!" cried Jude in all the terrible
sickness of hopeless, handicapped love.

He could not interfere.  Was he not Arabella's?  He was unable to
go on further, and retraced his steps towards Christminster.  Every
tread of his feet seemed to say to him that he must on no account
stand in the schoolmaster's way with Sue.  Phillotson was perhaps
twenty years her senior, but many a happy marriage had been made
in such conditions of age.  The ironical clinch to his sorrow was
given by the thought that the intimacy between his cousin and the
schoolmaster had been brought about entirely by himself.

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

completion: Phillotson's interest in Sue quickly becomes more than that of a master in a new teacher. Though he is impressed by her ability as a teacher, he is also attracted to her as a person. On the occasion of their taking the pupils to Christminster to see a model of Jerusalem, Sue questions the authenticity of the reproduction and remarks, to Phillotson's surprise, that Jerusalem was certainly not first-rate by comparison with other ancient cities. They encounter Jude at the exhibition, and when Phillotson mentions Sue's criticizing the model Jude says he understands what she means. A few days later a school inspector visits the school to observe Sue at work, and she is so upset that Phillotson has to look after her, assuring her with more than professional interest that she is the best teacher he's ever had. When Jude comes to visit them at Lumsdon, at their request, he observes their coming out of the vicarage together and Sue's not objecting to Phillotson's putting his arm around her waist. Jude returns to the city without calling on them, appalled at what he has been responsible for.


prompt:
Chapter: Jude's old and embittered aunt lay unwell at Marygreen, and on the
following Sunday he went to see her--a visit which was the result of
a victorious struggle against his inclination to turn aside to the
village of Lumsdon and obtain a miserable interview with his cousin,
in which the word nearest his heart could not be spoken, and the
sight which had tortured him could not be revealed.

His aunt was now unable to leave her bed, and a great part of Jude's
short day was occupied in making arrangements for her comfort.  The
little bakery business had been sold to a neighbour, and with the
proceeds of this and her savings she was comfortably supplied with
necessaries and more, a widow of the same village living with her and
ministering to her wants.  It was not till the time had nearly come
for him to leave that he obtained a quiet talk with her, and his
words tended insensibly towards his cousin.

"Was Sue born here?"

"She was--in this room.  They were living here at that time.  What
made 'ee ask that?"

"Oh--I wanted to know."

"Now you've been seeing her!" said the harsh old woman.  "And what
did I tell 'ee?"

"Well--that I was not to see her."

"Have you gossiped with her?"

"Yes."

"Then don't keep it up.  She was brought up by her father to hate her
mother's family; and she'll look with no favour upon a working chap
like you--a townish girl as she's become by now.  I never cared much
about her.  A pert little thing, that's what she was too often, with
her tight-strained nerves.  Many's the time I've smacked her for her
impertinence.  Why, one day when she was walking into the pond with
her shoes and stockings off, and her petticoats pulled above her
knees, afore I could cry out for shame, she said: 'Move on, Aunty!
This is no sight for modest eyes!'"

"She was a little child then."

"She was twelve if a day."

"Well--of course.  But now she's older she's of a thoughtful,
quivering, tender nature, and as sensitive as--"

"Jude!" cried his aunt, springing up in bed.  "Don't you be a fool
about her!"

"No, no, of course not."

"Your marrying that woman Arabella was about as bad a thing as a man
could possibly do for himself by trying hard.  But she's gone to
the other side of the world, and med never trouble you again.  And
there'll be a worse thing if you, tied and bound as you be, should
have a fancy for Sue.  If your cousin is civil to you, take her
civility for what it is worth.  But anything more than a relation's
good wishes it is stark madness for 'ee to give her.  If she's
townish and wanton it med bring 'ee to ruin."

"Don't say anything against her, Aunt!  Don't, please!"

A relief was afforded to him by the entry of the companion and nurse
of his aunt, who must have been listening to the conversation, for
she began a commentary on past years, introducing Sue Bridehead as
a character in her recollections.  She described what an odd little
maid Sue had been when a pupil at the village school across the green
opposite, before her father went to London--how, when the vicar
arranged readings and recitations, she appeared on the platform, the
smallest of them all, "in her little white frock, and shoes, and pink
sash"; how she recited "Excelsior," "There was a sound of revelry by
night," and "The Raven"; how during the delivery she would knit her
little brows and glare round tragically, and say to the empty air, as
if some real creature stood there--

   "Ghastly, grim, and ancient Raven,
      wandering from the Nightly shore,
   Tell me what thy lordly name is
      on the Night's Plutonian shore!"

"She'd bring up the nasty carrion bird that clear," corroborated the
sick woman reluctantly, "as she stood there in her little sash and
things, that you could see un a'most before your very eyes.  You too,
Jude, had the same trick as a child of seeming to see things in the
air."

The neighbour told also of Sue's accomplishments in other kinds:

"She was not exactly a tomboy, you know; but she could do things that
only boys do, as a rule.  I've seen her hit in and steer down the
long slide on yonder pond, with her little curls blowing, one of
a file of twenty moving along against the sky like shapes painted
on glass, and up the back slide without stopping.  All boys except
herself; and then they'd cheer her, and then she'd say, 'Don't be
saucy, boys,' and suddenly run indoors.  They'd try to coax her out
again.  But 'a wouldn't come."

These retrospective visions of Sue only made Jude the more miserable
that he was unable to woo her, and he left the cottage of his aunt
that day with a heavy heart.  He would fain have glanced into the
school to see the room in which Sue's little figure had so glorified
itself; but he checked his desire and went on.

It being Sunday evening some villagers who had known him during his
residence here were standing in a group in their best clothes.  Jude
was startled by a salute from one of them:

"Ye've got there right enough, then!"

Jude showed that he did not understand.

"Why, to the seat of l'arning--the 'City of Light' you used to talk
to us about as a little boy!  Is it all you expected of it?"

"Yes; more!" cried Jude.

"When I was there once for an hour I didn't see much in it for my
part; auld crumbling buildings, half church, half almshouse, and not
much going on at that."

"You are wrong, John; there is more going on than meets the eye of a
man walking through the streets.  It is a unique centre of thought
and religion--the intellectual and spiritual granary of this country.
All that silence and absence of goings-on is the stillness of
infinite motion--the sleep of the spinning-top, to borrow the simile
of a well-known writer."

"Oh, well, it med be all that, or it med not.  As I say, I didn't see
nothing of it the hour or two I was there; so I went in and had a pot
o' beer, and a penny loaf, and a ha'porth o' cheese, and waited till
it was time to come along home.  You've j'ined a college by this
time, I suppose?"

"Ah, no!" said Jude.  "I am almost as far off that as ever."

"How so?"

Jude slapped his pocket.

"Just what we thought!  Such places be not for such as you--only for
them with plenty o' money."

"There you are wrong," said Jude, with some bitterness.  "They are
for such ones!"

Still, the remark was sufficient to withdraw Jude's attention from
the imaginative world he had lately inhabited, in which an abstract
figure, more or less himself, was steeping his mind in a sublimation
of the arts and sciences, and making his calling and election sure
to a seat in the paradise of the learned.  He was set regarding his
prospects in a cold northern light.  He had lately felt that he
could not quite satisfy himself in his Greek--in the Greek of
the dramatists particularly.  So fatigued was he sometimes after
his day's work that he could not maintain the critical attention
necessary for thorough application.  He felt that he wanted a
coach--a friend at his elbow to tell him in a moment what sometimes
would occupy him a weary month in extracting from unanticipative,
clumsy books.

It was decidedly necessary to consider facts a little more closely
than he had done of late.  What was the good, after all, of using
up his spare hours in a vague labour called "private study" without
giving an outlook on practicabilities?

"I ought to have thought of this before," he said, as he journeyed
back.  "It would have been better never to have embarked in the
scheme at all than to do it without seeing clearly where I am going,
or what I am aiming at...  This hovering outside the walls of the
colleges, as if expecting some arm to be stretched out from them to
lift me inside, won't do!  I must get special information."

The next week accordingly he sought it.  What at first seemed an
opportunity occurred one afternoon when he saw an elderly gentleman,
who had been pointed out as the head of a particular college, walking
in the public path of a parklike enclosure near the spot at which
Jude chanced to be sitting.  The gentleman came nearer, and Jude
looked anxiously at his face.  It seemed benign, considerate, yet
rather reserved.  On second thoughts Jude felt that he could not
go up and address him; but he was sufficiently influenced by the
incident to think what a wise thing it would be for him to state his
difficulties by letter to some of the best and most judicious of
these old masters, and obtain their advice.

During the next week or two he accordingly placed himself in such
positions about the city as would afford him glimpses of several
of the most distinguished among the provosts, wardens, and other
heads of houses; and from those he ultimately selected five whose
physiognomies seemed to say to him that they were appreciative and
far-seeing men.  To these five he addressed letters, briefly stating
his difficulties, and asking their opinion on his stranded situation.

When the letters were posted Jude mentally began to criticize
them; he wished they had not been sent.  "It is just one of those
intrusive, vulgar, pushing, applications which are so common in these
days," he thought.  "Why couldn't I know better than address utter
strangers in such a way?  I may be an impostor, an idle scamp, a man
with a bad character, for all that they know to the contrary...
Perhaps that's what I am!"

Nevertheless, he found himself clinging to the hope of some reply
as to his one last chance of redemption.  He waited day after day,
saying that it was perfectly absurd to expect, yet expecting.
While he waited he was suddenly stirred by news about Phillotson.
Phillotson was giving up the school near Christminster, for a larger
one further south, in Mid-Wessex.  What this meant; how it would
affect his cousin; whether, as seemed possible, it was a practical
move of the schoolmaster's towards a larger income, in view of a
provision for two instead of one, he would not allow himself to say.
And the tender relations between Phillotson and the young girl of
whom Jude was passionately enamoured effectually made it repugnant to
Jude's tastes to apply to Phillotson for advice on his own scheme.

Meanwhile the academic dignitaries to whom Jude had written
vouchsafed no answer, and the young man was thus thrown back
entirely on himself, as formerly, with the added gloom of a weakened
hope.  By indirect inquiries he soon perceived clearly what he had
long uneasily suspected, that to qualify himself for certain open
scholarships and exhibitions was the only brilliant course.  But to
do this a good deal of coaching would be necessary, and much natural
ability.  It was next to impossible that a man reading on his own
system, however widely and thoroughly, even over the prolonged period
of ten years, should be able to compete with those who had passed
their lives under trained teachers and had worked to ordained lines.

The other course, that of buying himself in, so to speak, seemed the
only one really open to men like him, the difficulty being simply of
a material kind.  With the help of his information he began to reckon
the extent of this material obstacle, and ascertained, to his dismay,
that, at the rate at which, with the best of fortune, he would be
able to save money, fifteen years must elapse before he could be in a
position to forward testimonials to the head of a college and advance
to a matriculation examination.  The undertaking was hopeless.

He saw what a curious and cunning glamour the neighbourhood of the
place had exercised over him.  To get there and live there, to move
among the churches and halls and become imbued with the _genius
loci_, had seemed to his dreaming youth, as the spot shaped its
charms to him from its halo on the horizon, the obvious and ideal
thing to do.  "Let me only get there," he had said with the
fatuousness of Crusoe over his big boat, "and the rest is but a
matter of time and energy."  It would have been far better for him in
every way if he had never come within sight and sound of the delusive
precincts, had gone to some busy commercial town with the sole object
of making money by his wits, and thence surveyed his plan in true
perspective.  Well, all that was clear to him amounted to this, that
the whole scheme had burst up, like an iridescent soap-bubble, under
the touch of a reasoned inquiry.  He looked back at himself along the
vista of his past years, and his thought was akin to Heine's:

   Above the youth's inspired and flashing eyes
   I see the motley mocking fool's-cap rise!

Fortunately he had not been allowed to bring his disappointment into
his dear Sue's life by involving her in this collapse.  And the
painful details of his awakening to a sense of his limitations should
now be spared her as far as possible.  After all, she had only known
a little part of the miserable struggle in which he had been engaged
thus unequipped, poor, and unforeseeing.

He always remembered the appearance of the afternoon on which he
awoke from his dream.  Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he
went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built
theatre that was set amidst this quaint and singular city.  It had
windows all round, from which an outlook over the whole town and
its edifices could be gained.  Jude's eyes swept all the views in
succession, meditatively, mournfully, yet sturdily.  Those buildings
and their associations and privileges were not for him.  From the
looming roof of the great library, into which he hardly ever had time
to enter, his gaze travelled on to the varied spires, halls, gables,
streets, chapels, gardens, quadrangles, which composed the ensemble
of this unrivalled panorama.  He saw that his destiny lay not with
these, but among the manual toilers in the shabby purlieu which he
himself occupied, unrecognized as part of the city at all by its
visitors and panegyrists, yet without whose denizens the hard readers
could not read nor the high thinkers live.

He looked over the town into the country beyond, to the trees which
screened her whose presence had at first been the support of his
heart, and whose loss was now a maddening torture.  But for this blow
he might have borne with his fate.  With Sue as companion he could
have renounced his ambitions with a smile.  Without her it was
inevitable that the reaction from the long strain to which he had
subjected himself should affect him disastrously.  Phillotson had
no doubt passed through a similar intellectual disappointment to
that which now enveloped him.  But the schoolmaster had been since
blest with the consolation of sweet Sue, while for him there was no
consoler.

Descending to the streets, he went listlessly along till he arrived
at an inn, and entered it.  Here he drank several glasses of beer in
rapid succession, and when he came out it was night.  By the light of
the flickering lamps he rambled home to supper, and had not long been
sitting at table when his landlady brought up a letter that had just
arrived for him.  She laid it down as if impressed with a sense of
its possible importance, and on looking at it Jude perceived that it
bore the embossed stamp of one of the colleges whose heads he had
addressed.  "ONE--at last!" cried Jude.

The communication was brief, and not exactly what he had expected;
though it really was from the master in person.  It ran thus:

   BIBLIOLL COLLEGE.

   SIR,--I have read your letter with interest; and, judging
   from your description of yourself as a working-man, I
   venture to think that you will have a much better chance
   of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and
   sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course.
   That, therefore, is what I advise you to do.  Yours
   faithfully,

   T. TETUPHENAY.

   To Mr. J. FAWLEY, Stone-mason.

This terribly sensible advice exasperated Jude.  He had known all
that before.  He knew it was true.  Yet it seemed a hard slap after
ten years of labour, and its effect upon him just now was to make him
rise recklessly from the table, and, instead of reading as usual, to
go downstairs and into the street.  He stood at a bar and tossed off
two or three glasses, then unconsciously sauntered along till he
came to a spot called The Fourways in the middle of the city, gazing
abstractedly at the groups of people like one in a trance, till,
coming to himself, he began talking to the policeman fixed there.

That officer yawned, stretched out his elbows, elevated himself
an inch and a half on the balls of his toes, smiled, and looking
humorously at Jude, said, "You've had a wet, young man."

"No; I've only begun," he replied cynically.

Whatever his wetness, his brains were dry enough.  He only heard in
part the policeman's further remarks, having fallen into thought on
what struggling people like himself had stood at that crossway, whom
nobody ever thought of now.  It had more history than the oldest
college in the city.  It was literally teeming, stratified, with the
shades of human groups, who had met there for tragedy, comedy, farce;
real enactments of the intensest kind.  At Fourways men had stood
and talked of Napoleon, the loss of America, the execution of King
Charles, the burning of the Martyrs, the Crusades, the Norman
Conquest, possibly of the arrival of Caesar.  Here the two sexes had
met for loving, hating, coupling, parting; had waited, had suffered,
for each other; had triumphed over each other; cursed each other in
jealousy, blessed each other in forgiveness.

He began to see that the town life was a book of humanity infinitely
more palpitating, varied, and compendious than the gown life.
These struggling men and women before him were the reality of
Christminster, though they knew little of Christ or Minster.
That was one of the humours of things.  The floating population
of students and teachers, who did know both in a way, were not
Christminster in a local sense at all.

He looked at his watch, and, in pursuit of this idea, he went on till
he came to a public hall, where a promenade concert was in progress.
Jude entered, and found the room full of shop youths and girls,
soldiers, apprentices, boys of eleven smoking cigarettes, and light
women of the more respectable and amateur class.  He had tapped the
real Christminster life.  A band was playing, and the crowd walked
about and jostled each other, and every now and then a man got upon
a platform and sang a comic song.

The spirit of Sue seemed to hover round him and prevent his flirting
and drinking with the frolicsome girls who made advances--wistful
to gain a little joy.  At ten o'clock he came away, choosing a
circuitous route homeward to pass the gates of the college whose head
had just sent him the note.

The gates were shut, and, by an impulse, he took from his pocket the
lump of chalk which as a workman he usually carried there, and wrote
along the wall:

"_I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you:
yea, who knoweth not such things as these?_"--Job xii. 3.

The stroke of scorn relieved his mind, and the next morning he
laughed at his self-conceit. But the laugh was not a healthy one.
He re-read the letter from the master, and the wisdom in its lines,
which had at first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now.
He saw himself as a fool indeed.

Deprived of the objects of both intellect and emotion, he could not
proceed to his work.  Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a
student, there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with
Sue.  That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him
through his marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till,
unable to bear it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the
real Christminster life.  He now sought it out in an obscure and
low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies
of the place, and in brighter times would have interested him simply
by its quaintness.  Here he sat more or less all the day, convinced
that he was at bottom a vicious character, of whom it was hopeless to
expect anything.

In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one,
Jude still retaining his seat in the corner, though his money was all
spent, and he had not eaten anything the whole day except a biscuit.
He surveyed his gathering companions with all the equanimity
and philosophy of a man who has been drinking long and slowly,
and made friends with several: to wit, Tinker Taylor, a decayed
church-ironmonger who appeared to have been of a religious turn in
earlier years, but was somewhat blasphemous now; also a red-nosed
auctioneer; also two Gothic masons like himself, called Uncle Jim and
Uncle Joe.  There were present, too, some clerks, and a gown- and
surplice-maker's assistant; two ladies who sported moral characters
of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed
"Bower o' Bliss" and "Freckles"; some horsey men "in the know"
of betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two
devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates;
they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups,
and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents
aforesaid, looking at their watches every now and then.

The conversation waxed general.  Christminster society was
criticized, the dons, magistrates, and other people in authority
being sincerely pitied for their shortcomings, while opinions on how
they ought to conduct themselves and their affairs to be properly
respected, were exchanged in a large-minded and disinterested manner.

Jude Fawley, with the self-conceit, effrontery, and _aplomb_ of
a strong-brained fellow in liquor, threw in his remarks somewhat
peremptorily; and his aims having been what they were for so many
years, everything the others said turned upon his tongue, by a sort
of mechanical craze, to the subject of scholarship and study, the
extent of his own learning being dwelt upon with an insistence that
would have appeared pitiable to himself in his sane hours.

"I don't care a damn," he was saying, "for any provost, warden,
principal, fellow, or cursed master of arts in the university!  What
I know is that I'd lick 'em on their own ground if they'd give me a
chance, and show 'em a few things they are not up to yet!"

"Hear, hear!" said the undergraduates from the corner, where they
were talking privately about the pups.

"You always was fond o' books, I've heard," said Tinker Taylor, "and
I don't doubt what you state.  Now with me 'twas different.  I always
saw there was more to be learnt outside a book than in; and I took my
steps accordingly, or I shouldn't have been the man I am."

"You aim at the Church, I believe?" said Uncle Joe.  "If you are such
a scholar as to pitch yer hopes so high as that, why not give us a
specimen of your scholarship?  Canst say the Creed in Latin, man?
That was how they once put it to a chap down in my country."

"I should think so!" said Jude haughtily.

"Not he!  Like his conceit!" screamed one of the ladies.

"Just you shut up, Bower o' Bliss!" said one of the undergraduates.
"Silence!"  He drank off the spirits in his tumbler, rapped with it
on the counter, and announced, "The gentleman in the corner is going
to rehearse the Articles of his Belief, in the Latin tongue, for the
edification of the company."

"I won't!" said Jude.

"Yes--have a try!" said the surplice-maker.

"You can't!" said Uncle Joe.

"Yes, he can!" said Tinker Taylor.

"I'll swear I can!" said Jude.  "Well, come now, stand me a small
Scotch cold, and I'll do it straight off."

"That's a fair offer," said the undergraduate, throwing down the
money for the whisky.

The barmaid concocted the mixture with the bearing of a person
compelled to live amongst animals of an inferior species, and the
glass was handed across to Jude, who, having drunk the contents,
stood up and began rhetorically, without hesitation:

"_Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Factorem coeli et terrae,
visibilium omnium et invisibilium._"

"Good!  Excellent Latin!" cried one of the undergraduates, who,
however, had not the slightest conception of a single word.

A silence reigned among the rest in the bar, and the maid stood
still, Jude's voice echoing sonorously into the inner parlour, where
the landlord was dozing, and bringing him out to see what was going
on.  Jude had declaimed steadily ahead, and was continuing:

"_Crucifixus etiam pro nobis: sub Pontio Pilato passus, et sepultus
est.  Et resurrexit tertia die, secundum Scripturas._"

"That's the Nicene," sneered the second undergraduate.  "And we
wanted the Apostles'!"

"You didn't say so!  And every fool knows, except you, that the
Nicene is the most historic creed!"

"Let un go on, let un go on!" said the auctioneer.

But Jude's mind seemed to grow confused soon, and he could not get
on.  He put his hand to his forehead, and his face assumed an
expression of pain.

"Give him another glass--then he'll fetch up and get through it,"
said Tinker Taylor.

Somebody threw down threepence, the glass was handed, Jude stretched
out his arm for it without looking, and having swallowed the liquor,
went on in a moment in a revived voice, raising it as he neared the
end with the manner of a priest leading a congregation:

"_Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum et vivificantem, qui ex Patre
Filioque procedit.  Qui cum Patre et Filio simul adoratur et
conglorificatur.  Qui locutus est per prophetas.

"Et unam Catholicam et Apostolicam Ecclesiam.  Confiteor unum
Baptisma in remissionem peccatorum.  Et exspecto Resurrectionem
mortuorum.  Et vitam venturi saeculi.  Amen._"

"Well done!" said several, enjoying the last word, as being the first
and only one they had recognized.

Then Jude seemed to shake the fumes from his brain, as he stared
round upon them.

"You pack of fools!" he cried.  "Which one of you knows whether I
have said it or no?  It might have been the Ratcatcher's Daughter
in double Dutch for all that your besotted heads can tell!  See what
I have brought myself to--the crew I have come among!"

The landlord, who had already had his license endorsed for harbouring
queer characters, feared a riot, and came outside the counter; but
Jude, in his sudden flash of reason, had turned in disgust and left
the scene, the door slamming with a dull thud behind him.

He hastened down the lane and round into the straight broad street,
which he followed till it merged in the highway, and all sound of his
late companions had been left behind.  Onward he still went, under
the influence of a childlike yearning for the one being in the world
to whom it seemed possible to fly--an unreasoning desire, whose ill
judgement was not apparent to him now.  In the course of an hour,
when it was between ten and eleven o'clock, he entered the village of
Lumsdon, and reaching the cottage, saw that a light was burning in
a downstairs room, which he assumed, rightly as it happened, to be
hers.

Jude stepped close to the wall, and tapped with his finger on the
pane, saying impatiently, "Sue, Sue!"

She must have recognized his voice, for the light disappeared from
the apartment, and in a second or two the door was unlocked and
opened, and Sue appeared with a candle in her hand.

"Is it Jude?  Yes, it is!  My dear, dear cousin, what's the matter?"

"Oh, I am--I couldn't help coming, Sue!" said he, sinking down upon
the doorstep.  "I am so wicked, Sue--my heart is nearly broken,
and I could not bear my life as it was!  So I have been drinking,
and blaspheming, or next door to it, and saying holy things in
disreputable quarters--repeating in idle bravado words which ought
never to be uttered but reverently!  Oh, do anything with me,
Sue--kill me--I don't care!  Only don't hate me and despise me like
all the rest of the world!"

"You are ill, poor dear!  No, I won't despise you; of course I won't!
Come in and rest, and let me see what I can do for you.  Now lean on
me, and don't mind."  With one hand holding the candle and the other
supporting him, she led him indoors, and placed him in the only easy
chair the meagrely furnished house afforded, stretching his feet upon
another, and pulling off his boots.  Jude, now getting towards his
sober senses, could only say, "Dear, dear Sue!" in a voice broken by
grief and contrition.

She asked him if he wanted anything to eat, but he shook his head.
Then telling him to go to sleep, and that she would come down early
in the morning and get him some breakfast, she bade him good-night
and ascended the stairs.

Almost immediately he fell into a heavy slumber, and did not wake
till dawn.  At first he did not know where he was, but by degrees his
situation cleared to him, and he beheld it in all the ghastliness
of a right mind.  She knew the worst of him--the very worst.  How
could he face her now?  She would soon be coming down to see about
breakfast, as she had said, and there would he be in all his shame
confronting her.  He could not bear the thought, and softly drawing
on his boots, and taking his hat from the nail on which she had hung
it, he slipped noiselessly out of the house.

His fixed idea was to get away to some obscure spot and hide, and
perhaps pray; and the only spot which occurred to him was Marygreen.
He called at his lodging in Christminster, where he found awaiting
him a note of dismissal from his employer; and having packed up he
turned his back upon the city that had been such a thorn in his
side, and struck southward into Wessex.  He had no money left in
his pocket, his small savings, deposited at one of the banks in
Christminster, having fortunately been left untouched.  To get to
Marygreen, therefore, his only course was walking; and the distance
being nearly twenty miles, he had ample time to complete on the way
the sobering process begun in him.

At some hour of the evening he reached Alfredston.  Here he pawned
his waistcoat, and having gone out of the town a mile or two, slept
under a rick that night.  At dawn he rose, shook off the hayseeds and
stems from his clothes, and started again, breasting the long white
road up the hill to the downs, which had been visible to him a long
way off, and passing the milestone at the top, whereon he had carved
his hopes years ago.

He reached the ancient hamlet while the people were at breakfast.
Weary and mud-bespattered, but quite possessed of his ordinary
clearness of brain, he sat down by the well, thinking as he did so
what a poor Christ he made.  Seeing a trough of water near he bathed
his face, and went on to the cottage of his great-aunt, whom he found
breakfasting in bed, attended by the woman who lived with her.

"What--out o' work?" asked his relative, regarding him through eyes
sunken deep, under lids heavy as pot-covers, no other cause for his
tumbled appearance suggesting itself to one whose whole life had been
a struggle with material things.

"Yes," said Jude heavily.  "I think I must have a little rest."

Refreshed by some breakfast, he went up to his old room and lay down
in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of the artizan.  He fell
asleep for a short while, and when he awoke it was as if he had
awakened in hell.  It WAS hell--"the hell of conscious failure," both
in ambition and in love.  He thought of that previous abyss into
which he had fallen before leaving this part of the country; the
deepest deep he had supposed it then; but it was not so deep as this.
That had been the breaking in of the outer bulwarks of his hope:
this was of his second line.

If he had been a woman he must have screamed under the nervous
tension which he was now undergoing.  But that relief being denied to
his virility, he clenched his teeth in misery, bringing lines about
his mouth like those in the Laocoon, and corrugations between his
brows.

A mournful wind blew through the trees, and sounded in the chimney
like the pedal notes of an organ.  Each ivy leaf overgrowing the wall
of the churchless church-yard hard by, now abandoned, pecked its
neighbour smartly, and the vane on the new Victorian-Gothic church in
the new spot had already begun to creak.  Yet apparently it was not
always the outdoor wind that made the deep murmurs; it was a voice.
He guessed its origin in a moment or two; the curate was praying with
his aunt in the adjoining room.  He remembered her speaking of him.
Presently the sounds ceased, and a step seemed to cross the landing.
Jude sat up, and shouted "Hoi!"

The step made for his door, which was open, and a man looked in.
It was a young clergyman.

"I think you are Mr. Highridge," said Jude.  "My aunt has mentioned
you more than once.  Well, here I am, just come home; a fellow gone
to the bad; though I had the best intentions in the world at one
time.  Now I am melancholy mad, what with drinking and one thing and
another."

Slowly Jude unfolded to the curate his late plans and movements, by
an unconscious bias dwelling less upon the intellectual and ambitious
side of his dream, and more upon the theological, though this had, up
till now, been merely a portion of the general plan of advancement.

"Now I know I have been a fool, and that folly is with me," added
Jude in conclusion.  "And I don't regret the collapse of my
university hopes one jot.  I wouldn't begin again if I were sure to
succeed.  I don't care for social success any more at all.  But I do
feel I should like to do some good thing; and I bitterly regret the
Church, and the loss of my chance of being her ordained minister."

The curate, who was a new man to this neighbourhood, had grown deeply
interested, and at last he said: "If you feel a real call to the
ministry, and I won't say from your conversation that you do not,
for it is that of a thoughtful and educated man, you might enter the
Church as a licentiate.  Only you must make up your mind to avoid
strong drink."

"I could avoid that easily enough, if I had any kind of hope to
support me!"

Part Third

AT MELCHESTER

   "For there was no other girl, O bridegroom,
    like her!"--SAPPHO (H. T. Wharton).

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

completion: The following Sunday Jude goes to Marygreen to visit his aunt, who is ill. When he reveals he has been seeing Sue the old woman warns him off, and both she and her companion, who looks after her, recall incidents revealing the fact that people in the town thought of Sue as a unique, sometimes unconventional, child. The fact that some of the villagers he meets remind him by their questions of his as yet unaccomplished purpose in going to Christminster causes Jude to take stock of himself. Practically, he has gotten nowhere; he decides to write to several masters in the colleges for advice. While waiting for replies, he learns that Phillotson is moving to a new school and wonders what this means. Realizing that he will be able to get into the university neither by qualifying for a scholarship nor by buying his way in, Jude considers how he has been seduced by the glamour of Christminster. From a high building he surveys the ancient university which it is not his destiny to be a part of, and he thinks how easily he could have given up his ambitions with Sue as a companion. After drinking at an inn, he goes home, to discover a letter of rejection from one of the masters he has written to. Again, he goes to a bar, later thinking as he walks alone that the real history of the city is in the streets among the common folk, not in the ancient buildings of the colleges. On a wall of the college whose master replied to his letter he scornfully scrawls a verse from Job. The next day, despairing of both his ambitions and his relationship with Sue, Jude spends the day drinking in a tavern, meeting some of the habitues and loudly leading the criticism of all aspects of university life. Challenged to repeat the Creed in Latin, Jude does so, with the help of drinks the others buy. Disgusted with himself and longing for Sue, he makes his way to Lumsdon and raps on her window. She takes him in and listens to him berate himself as wicked; she insists he get some sleep and promises him breakfast in the morning. Once awake in the morning, however, Jude is ashamed to face Sue and sneaks away, deciding he will leave Christminster. Discovering he has been dismissed by his employer, he packs his belongings and walks to Marygreen. Once there, he realizes that the ignominy into which he fell with Arabella is not nearly so deep as the abyss in which he now finds himself. Talking of this to the new clergyman who has called on his aunt, he says he is less sad over his inability to get into the university than he is over his losing the chance to get into the church.