prompt:
Chapter: At this memorable date of his life he was, one Saturday, returning
from Alfredston to Marygreen about three o'clock in the afternoon.
It was fine, warm, and soft summer weather, and he walked with his
tools at his back, his little chisels clinking faintly against the
larger ones in his basket.  It being the end of the week he had left
work early, and had come out of the town by a round-about route which
he did not usually frequent, having promised to call at a flour-mill
near Cresscombe to execute a commission for his aunt.

He was in an enthusiastic mood.  He seemed to see his way to living
comfortably in Christminster in the course of a year or two, and
knocking at the doors of one of those strongholds of learning of
which he had dreamed so much.  He might, of course, have gone there
now, in some capacity or other, but he preferred to enter the city
with a little more assurance as to means than he could be said to
feel at present.  A warm self-content suffused him when he considered
what he had already done.  Now and then as he went along he turned
to face the peeps of country on either side of him.  But he hardly
saw them; the act was an automatic repetition of what he had been
accustomed to do when less occupied; and the one matter which really
engaged him was the mental estimate of his progress thus far.

"I have acquired quite an average student's power to read the
common ancient classics, Latin in particular."  This was true,
Jude possessing a facility in that language which enabled him with
great ease to himself to beguile his lonely walks by imaginary
conversations therein.

"I have read two books of the _Iliad_, besides being pretty familiar
with passages such as the speech of Phoenix in the ninth book,
the fight of Hector and Ajax in the fourteenth, the appearance of
Achilles unarmed and his heavenly armour in the eighteenth, and the
funeral games in the twenty-third. I have also done some Hesiod, a
little scrap of Thucydides, and a lot of the Greek Testament...  I
wish there was only one dialect all the same.

"I have done some mathematics, including the first six and the
eleventh and twelfth books of Euclid; and algebra as far as simple
equations.

"I know something of the Fathers, and something of Roman and English
history.

"These things are only a beginning.  But I shall not make much
farther advance here, from the difficulty of getting books.  Hence I
must next concentrate all my energies on settling in Christminster.
Once there I shall so advance, with the assistance I shall there
get, that my present knowledge will appear to me but as childish
ignorance.  I must save money, and I will; and one of those colleges
shall open its doors to me--shall welcome whom now it would spurn,
if I wait twenty years for the welcome.

"I'll be D.D. before I have done!"

And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a
bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life.  And what
an example he would set!  If his income were L5000 a year, he would
give away L4500 in one form and another, and live sumptuously (for
him) on the remainder.  Well, on second thoughts, a bishop was
absurd.  He would draw the line at an archdeacon.  Perhaps a man
could be as good and as learned and as useful in the capacity of
archdeacon as in that of bishop.  Yet he thought of the bishop again.

"Meanwhile I will read, as soon as I am settled in Christminster,
the books I have not been able to get hold of here: Livy, Tacitus,
Herodotus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes--"

"Ha, ha, ha!  Hoity-toity!"  The sounds were expressed in light
voices on the other side of the hedge, but he did not notice them.
His thoughts went on:

"--Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, Lucretius, Epictetus, Seneca,
Antoninus.  Then I must master other things: the Fathers thoroughly;
Bede and ecclesiastical history generally; a smattering of Hebrew--I
only know the letters as yet--"

"Hoity-toity!"

"--but I can work hard.  I have staying power in abundance, thank
God! and it is that which tells.... Yes, Christminster shall be my
Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well
pleased."

In his deep concentration on these transactions of the future Jude's
walk had slackened, and he was now standing quite still, looking
at the ground as though the future were thrown thereon by a magic
lantern.  On a sudden something smacked him sharply in the ear, and
he became aware that a soft cold substance had been flung at him, and
had fallen at his feet.

A glance told him what it was--a piece of flesh, the characteristic
part of a barrow-pig, which the countrymen used for greasing their
boots, as it was useless for any other purpose.  Pigs were rather
plentiful hereabout, being bred and fattened in large numbers in
certain parts of North Wessex.

On the other side of the hedge was a stream, whence, as he now for
the first time realized, had come the slight sounds of voices and
laughter that had mingled with his dreams.  He mounted the bank and
looked over the fence.  On the further side of the stream stood a
small homestead, having a garden and pig-sties attached; in front of
it, beside the brook, three young women were kneeling, with buckets
and platters beside them containing heaps of pigs' chitterlings,
which they were washing in the running water.  One or two pairs of
eyes slyly glanced up, and perceiving that his attention had at last
been attracted, and that he was watching them, they braced themselves
for inspection by putting their mouths demurely into shape and
recommencing their rinsing operations with assiduity.

"Thank you!" said Jude severely.

"I DIDN'T throw it, I tell you!" asserted one girl to her neighbour,
as if unconscious of the young man's presence.

"Nor I," the second answered.

"Oh, Anny, how can you!" said the third.

"If I had thrown anything at all, it shouldn't have been THAT!"

"Pooh!  I don't care for him!"  And they laughed and continued their
work, without looking up, still ostentatiously accusing each other.

Jude grew sarcastic as he wiped his face, and caught their remarks.

"YOU didn't do it--oh no!" he said to the up-stream one of the three.

She whom he addressed was a fine dark-eyed girl, not exactly
handsome, but capable of passing as such at a little distance,
despite some coarseness of skin and fibre.  She had a round and
prominent bosom, full lips, perfect teeth, and the rich complexion
of a Cochin hen's egg.  She was a complete and substantial female
animal--no more, no less; and Jude was almost certain that to her was
attributable the enterprise of attracting his attention from dreams
of the humaner letters to what was simmering in the minds around him.

"That you'll never be told," said she deedily.

"Whoever did it was wasteful of other people's property."

"Oh, that's nothing."

"But you want to speak to me, I suppose?"

"Oh yes; if you like to."

"Shall I clamber across, or will you come to the plank above here?"

Perhaps she foresaw an opportunity; for somehow or other the eyes
of the brown girl rested in his own when he had said the words, and
there was a momentary flash of intelligence, a dumb announcement of
affinity _in posse_ between herself and him, which, so far as Jude
Fawley was concerned, had no sort of premeditation in it.  She saw
that he had singled her out from the three, as a woman is singled out
in such cases, for no reasoned purpose of further acquaintance, but
in commonplace obedience to conjunctive orders from headquarters,
unconsciously received by unfortunate men when the last intention of
their lives is to be occupied with the feminine.

Springing to her feet, she said: "Bring back what is lying there."

Jude was now aware that no message on any matter connected with her
father's business had prompted her signal to him.  He set down his
basket of tools, picked up the scrap of offal, beat a pathway for
himself with his stick, and got over the hedge.  They walked in
parallel lines, one on each bank of the stream, towards the small
plank bridge.  As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave without Jude
perceiving it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her
cheeks in succession, by which curious and original manoeuvre she
brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a perfect
dimple, which she was able to retain there as long as she continued
to smile.  This production of dimples at will was a not unknown
operation, which many attempted, but only a few succeeded in
accomplishing.

They met in the middle of the plank, and Jude, tossing back her
missile, seemed to expect her to explain why she had audaciously
stopped him by this novel artillery instead of by hailing him.

But she, slyly looking in another direction, swayed herself backwards
and forwards on her hand as it clutched the rail of the bridge; till,
moved by amatory curiosity, she turned her eyes critically upon him.

"You don't think _I_ would shy things at you?"

"Oh no."

"We are doing this for my father, who naturally doesn't want anything
thrown away.  He makes that into dubbin."  She nodded towards the
fragment on the grass.

"What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?" Jude asked,
politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as
to its truth.

"Impudence.  Don't tell folk it was I, mind!"

"How can I?  I don't know your name."

"Ah, no.  Shall I tell it to you?"

"Do!"

"Arabella Donn.  I'm living here."

"I must have known it if I had often come this way.  But I mostly go
straight along the high-road."

"My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me wash the
innerds for black-puddings and such like."

They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding
each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge.  The
unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly
by Arabella's personality, held Jude to the spot against his
intention--almost against his will, and in a way new to his
experience.  It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this
moment Jude had never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but
had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes.
He gazed from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her
full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and
firm as marble.

"What a nice-looking girl you are!" he murmured, though the words had
not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.

"Ah, you should see me Sundays!" she said piquantly.

"I don't suppose I could?" he answered

"That's for you to think on.  There's nobody after me just now,
though there med be in a week or two."  She had spoken this without
a smile, and the dimples disappeared.

Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it.  "Will
you let me?"

"I don't mind."

By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning
her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking
operation before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than
a general impression of her appearance.  "Next Sunday?" he hazarded.
"To-morrow, that is?"

"Yes."

"Shall I call?"

"Yes."

She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost
tenderly with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the
brookside grass rejoined her companions.

Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,
filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze.  He had
just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had
evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not
how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as
by a sheet of glass.  The intentions as to reading, working, and
learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes
earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not
how.

"Well, it's only a bit of fun," he said to himself, faintly conscious
that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more
obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had
drawn him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere
sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her--something in
her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied
with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream.  It had
been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him.
He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short fleeting
while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an
inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness.  And then
this passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to
all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure,
that of having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto
unsuspected, though it had lain close beside him.  He was to meet
this enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.

Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently
resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid
stream.

"Catched un, my dear?" laconically asked the girl called Anny.

"I don't know.  I wish I had thrown something else than that!"
regretfully murmured Arabella.

"Lord! he's nobody, though you med think so.  He used to drive old
Drusilla Fawley's bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he 'prenticed
himself at Alfredston.  Since then he's been very stuck up, and
always reading.  He wants to be a scholar, they say."

"Oh, I don't care what he is, or anything about 'n.  Don't you think
it, my child!"

"Oh, don't ye!  You needn't try to deceive us!  What did you stay
talking to him for, if you didn't want un?  Whether you do or whether
you don't, he's as simple as a child.  I could see it as you courted
on the bridge, when he looked at 'ee as if he had never seen a woman
before in his born days.  Well, he's to be had by any woman who can
get him to care for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch
him the right way."

The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping
ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black
mark on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past
months.

It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with
Arabella Donn.  During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to
set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,--the re-reading of
his Greek Testament--his new one, with better type than his old copy,
following Griesbach's text as amended by numerous correctors, and
with variorum readings in the margin.  He was proud of the book,
having obtained it by boldly writing to its London publisher, a thing
he had never done before.

He had anticipated much pleasure in this afternoon's reading, under
the quiet roof of his great-aunt's house as formerly, where he now
slept only two nights a week.  But a new thing, a great hitch, had
happened yesterday in the gliding and noiseless current of his life,
and he felt as a snake must feel who has sloughed off its winter
skin, and cannot understand the brightness and sensitiveness of its
new one.

He would not go out to meet her, after all.  He sat down, opened the
book, and with his elbows firmly planted on the table, and his hands
to his temples, began at the beginning:

   HE KAINE DIATHEKE

Had he promised to call for her?  Surely he had!  She would wait
indoors, poor girl, and waste all her afternoon on account of him.
There was a something in her, too, which was very winning, apart from
promises.  He ought not to break faith with her.  Even though he had
only Sundays and week-day evenings for reading he could afford one
afternoon, seeing that other young men afforded so many.  After
to-day he would never probably see her again.  Indeed, it would be
impossible, considering what his plans were.

In short, as if materially, a compelling arm of extraordinary
muscular power seized hold of him--something which had nothing in
common with the spirits and influences that had moved him hitherto.
This seemed to care little for his reason and his will, nothing for
his so-called elevated intentions, and moved him along, as a violent
schoolmaster a schoolboy he has seized by the collar, in a direction
which tended towards the embrace of a woman for whom he had no
respect, and whose life had nothing in common with his own except
locality.

HE KAINE DIATHEKE was no more heeded, and the predestinate Jude
sprang up and across the room.  Foreseeing such an event he had
already arrayed himself in his best clothes.  In three minutes he was
out of the house and descending by the path across the wide vacant
hollow of corn-ground which lay between the village and the isolated
house of Arabella in the dip beyond the upland.

As he walked he looked at his watch.  He could be back in two hours,
easily, and a good long time would still remain to him for reading
after tea.

Passing the few unhealthy fir-trees and cottage where the path
joined the highway he hastened along, and struck away to the left,
descending the steep side of the country to the west of the Brown
House.  Here at the base of the chalk formation he neared the brook
that oozed from it, and followed the stream till he reached her
dwelling.  A smell of piggeries came from the back, and the grunting
of the originators of that smell.  He entered the garden, and knocked
at the door with the knob of his stick.

Somebody had seen him through the window, for a male voice on the
inside said:

"Arabella!  Here's your young man come coorting!  Mizzle, my girl!"

Jude winced at the words.  Courting in such a businesslike aspect as
it evidently wore to the speaker was the last thing he was thinking
of.  He was going to walk with her, perhaps kiss her; but "courting"
was too coolly purposeful to be anything but repugnant to his ideas.
The door was opened and he entered, just as Arabella came downstairs
in radiant walking attire.

"Take a chair, Mr. What's-your-name?" said her father, an energetic,
black-whiskered man, in the same businesslike tones Jude had heard
from outside.

"I'd rather go out at once, wouldn't you?" she whispered to Jude.

"Yes," said he.  "We'll walk up to the Brown House and back, we can
do it in half an hour."

Arabella looked so handsome amid her untidy surroundings that he felt
glad he had come, and all the misgivings vanished that had hitherto
haunted him.

First they clambered to the top of the great down, during which
ascent he had occasionally to take her hand to assist her.  Then
they bore off to the left along the crest into the ridgeway, which
they followed till it intersected the high-road at the Brown
House aforesaid, the spot of his former fervid desires to behold
Christminster.  But he forgot them now.  He talked the commonest
local twaddle to Arabella with greater zest than he would have felt
in discussing all the philosophies with all the Dons in the recently
adored university, and passed the spot where he had knelt to Diana
and Phoebus without remembering that there were any such people in
the mythology, or that the sun was anything else than a useful
lamp for illuminating Arabella's face.  An indescribable lightness
of heel served to lift him along; and Jude, the incipient scholar,
prospective D.D., professor, bishop, or what not, felt himself
honoured and glorified by the condescension of this handsome country
wench in agreeing to take a walk with him in her Sunday frock and
ribbons.

They reached the Brown House barn--the point at which he had planned
to turn back.  While looking over the vast northern landscape from
this spot they were struck by the rising of a dense volume of smoke
from the neighbourhood of the little town which lay beneath them at a
distance of a couple of miles.

"It is a fire," said Arabella.  "Let's run and see it--do!  It is not
far!"

The tenderness which had grown up in Jude's bosom left him no will to
thwart her inclination now--which pleased him in affording him excuse
for a longer time with her.  They started off down the hill almost at
a trot; but on gaining level ground at the bottom, and walking a
mile, they found that the spot of the fire was much further off than
it had seemed.

Having begun their journey, however, they pushed on; but it was not
till five o'clock that they found themselves on the scene,--the
distance being altogether about half-a-dozen miles from Marygreen,
and three from Arabella's.  The conflagration had been got under
by the time they reached it, and after a short inspection of the
melancholy ruins they retraced their steps--their course lying
through the town of Alfredston.

Arabella said she would like some tea, and they entered an inn of an
inferior class, and gave their order.  As it was not for beer they
had a long time to wait.  The maid-servant recognized Jude, and
whispered her surprise to her mistress in the background, that he,
the student "who kept hisself up so particular," should have suddenly
descended so low as to keep company with Arabella.  The latter
guessed what was being said, and laughed as she met the serious and
tender gaze of her lover--the low and triumphant laugh of a careless
woman who sees she is winning her game.

They sat and looked round the room, and at the picture of Samson and
Delilah which hung on the wall, and at the circular beer-stains on
the table, and at the spittoons underfoot filled with sawdust.  The
whole aspect of the scene had that depressing effect on Jude which
few places can produce like a tap-room on a Sunday evening when
the setting sun is slanting in, and no liquor is going, and the
unfortunate wayfarer finds himself with no other haven of rest.

It began to grow dusk.  They could not wait longer, really, for the
tea, they said.  "Yet what else can we do?" asked Jude.  "It is a
three-mile walk for you."

"I suppose we can have some beer," said Arabella.

"Beer, oh yes.  I had forgotten that.  Somehow it seems odd to come
to a public-house for beer on a Sunday evening."

"But we didn't."

"No, we didn't." Jude by this time wished he was out of such an
uncongenial atmosphere; but he ordered the beer, which was promptly
brought.

Arabella tasted it.  "Ugh!" she said.

Jude tasted.  "What's the matter with it?" he asked.  "I don't
understand beer very much now, it is true.  I like it well enough,
but it is bad to read on, and I find coffee better.  But this seems
all right."

"Adulterated--I can't touch it!"  She mentioned three or four
ingredients that she detected in the liquor beyond malt and hops,
much to Jude's surprise.

"How much you know!" he said good-humouredly.

Nevertheless she returned to the beer and drank her share, and they
went on their way.  It was now nearly dark, and as soon as they had
withdrawn from the lights of the town they walked closer together,
till they touched each other.  She wondered why he did not put his
arm round her waist, but he did not; he merely said what to himself
seemed a quite bold enough thing: "Take my arm."

She took it, thoroughly, up to the shoulder.  He felt the warmth of
her body against his, and putting his stick under his other arm held
with his right hand her right as it rested in its place.

"Now we are well together, dear, aren't we?" he observed.

"Yes," said she; adding to herself: "Rather mild!"

"How fast I have become!" he was thinking.

Thus they walked till they reached the foot of the upland, where they
could see the white highway ascending before them in the gloom.  From
this point the only way of getting to Arabella's was by going up the
incline, and dipping again into her valley on the right.  Before they
had climbed far they were nearly run into by two men who had been
walking on the grass unseen.

"These lovers--you find 'em out o' doors in all seasons and
weathers--lovers and homeless dogs only," said one of the men as
they vanished down the hill.

Arabella tittered lightly.

"Are we lovers?" asked Jude.

"You know best."

"But you can tell me?"

For answer she inclined her head upon his shoulder.  Jude took the
hint, and encircling her waist with his arm, pulled her to him and
kissed her.

They walked now no longer arm in arm but, as she had desired, clasped
together.  After all, what did it matter since it was dark, said Jude
to himself.  When they were half-way up the long hill they paused as
by arrangement, and he kissed her again.  They reached the top, and
he kissed her once more.

"You can keep your arm there, if you would like to," she said gently.

He did so, thinking how trusting she was.

Thus they slowly went towards her home.  He had left his cottage
at half-past three, intending to be sitting down again to the New
Testament by half-past five.  It was nine o'clock when, with another
embrace, he stood to deliver her up at her father's door.

She asked him to come in, if only for a minute, as it would seem so
odd otherwise, and as if she had been out alone in the dark.  He gave
way, and followed her in.  Immediately that the door was opened he
found, in addition to her parents, several neighbours sitting round.
They all spoke in a congratulatory manner, and took him seriously as
Arabella's intended partner.

They did not belong to his set or circle, and he felt out of place
and embarrassed.  He had not meant this: a mere afternoon of
pleasant walking with Arabella, that was all he had meant.  He did
not stay longer than to speak to her stepmother, a simple, quiet
woman without features or character; and bidding them all good night
plunged with a sense of relief into the track over the down.

But that sense was only temporary: Arabella soon re-asserted her
sway in his soul.  He walked as if he felt himself to be another man
from the Jude of yesterday.  What were his books to him? what were
his intentions, hitherto adhered to so strictly, as to not wasting a
single minute of time day by day?  "Wasting!"  It depended on your
point of view to define that: he was just living for the first
time: not wasting life.  It was better to love a woman than to be a
graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!

When he got back to the house his aunt had gone to bed, and a general
consciousness of his neglect seemed written on the face of all things
confronting him.  He went upstairs without a light, and the dim
interior of his room accosted him with sad inquiry.  There lay his
book open, just as he had left it, and the capital letters on the
title-page regarded him with fixed reproach in the grey starlight,
like the unclosed eyes of a dead man:

   HE KAINE DIATHEKE

     *     *     *     *     *     *

Jude had to leave early next morning for his usual week of absence at
lodgings; and it was with a sense of futility that he threw into his
basket upon his tools and other necessaries the unread book he had
brought with him.

He kept his impassioned doings a secret almost from himself.
Arabella, on the contrary, made them public among all her friends
and acquaintances.

Retracing by the light of dawn the road he had followed a few hours
earlier under cover of darkness, with his sweetheart by his side, he
reached the bottom of the hill, where he walked slowly, and stood
still.  He was on the spot where he had given her the first kiss.  As
the sun had only just risen it was possible that nobody had passed
there since.  Jude looked on the ground and sighed.  He looked
closely, and could just discern in the damp dust the imprints of
their feet as they had stood locked in each other's arms.  She was
not there now, and "the embroidery of imagination upon the stuff of
nature" so depicted her past presence that a void was in his heart
which nothing could fill.  A pollard willow stood close to the place,
and that willow was different from all other willows in the world.
Utter annihilation of the six days which must elapse before he could
see her again as he had promised would have been his intensest wish
if he had had only the week to live.

An hour and a half later Arabella came along the same way with her
two companions of the Saturday.  She passed unheedingly the scene of
the kiss, and the willow that marked it, though chattering freely on
the subject to the other two.

"And what did he tell 'ee next?"

"Then he said--"  And she related almost word for word some of his
tenderest speeches.  If Jude had been behind the fence he would have
felt not a little surprised at learning how very few of his sayings
and doings on the previous evening were private.

"You've got him to care for 'ee a bit, 'nation if you han't!"
murmured Anny judicially.  "It's well to be you!"

In a few moments Arabella replied in a curiously low, hungry tone of
latent sensuousness: "I've got him to care for me: yes!  But I want
him to more than care for me; I want him to have me--to marry me!  I
must have him.  I can't do without him.  He's the sort of man I long
for.  I shall go mad if I can't give myself to him altogether!  I
felt I should when I first saw him!"

"As he is a romancing, straightfor'ard, honest chap, he's to be had,
and as a husband, if you set about catching him in the right way."

Arabella remained thinking awhile.  "What med be the right way?" she
asked.

"Oh you don't know--you don't!" said Sarah, the third girl.

"On my word I don't!--No further, that is, than by plain courting,
and taking care he don't go too far!"

The third girl looked at the second.  "She DON'T know!"

"'Tis clear she don't!" said Anny.

"And having lived in a town, too, as one may say!  Well, we can teach
'ee som'at then, as well as you us."

"Yes.  And how do you mean--a sure way to gain a man?  Take me for an
innocent, and have done wi' it!"

"As a husband."

"As a husband."

"A countryman that's honourable and serious-minded such as he; God
forbid that I should say a sojer, or sailor, or commercial gent from
the towns, or any of them that be slippery with poor women!  I'd do
no friend that harm!"

"Well, such as he, of course!"

Arabella's companions looked at each other, and turning up their eyes
in drollery began smirking.  Then one went up close to Arabella, and,
although nobody was near, imparted some information in a low tone,
the other observing curiously the effect upon Arabella.

"Ah!" said the last-named slowly.  "I own I didn't think of that
way! ...  But suppose he ISN'T honourable?  A woman had better not
have tried it!"

"Nothing venture nothing have!  Besides, you make sure that he's
honourable before you begin.  You'd be safe enough with yours.  I
wish I had the chance!  Lots of girls do it; or do you think they'd
get married at all?"

Arabella pursued her way in silent thought.  "I'll try it!" she
whispered; but not to them.

One week's end Jude was as usual walking out to his aunt's at
Marygreen from his lodging in Alfredston, a walk which now had large
attractions for him quite other than his desire to see his aged and
morose relative.  He diverged to the right before ascending the hill
with the single purpose of gaining, on his way, a glimpse of Arabella
that should not come into the reckoning of regular appointments.
Before quite reaching the homestead his alert eye perceived the top
of her head moving quickly hither and thither over the garden hedge.
Entering the gate he found that three young unfattened pigs had
escaped from their sty by leaping clean over the top, and that she
was endeavouring unassisted to drive them in through the door which
she had set open.  The lines of her countenance changed from the
rigidity of business to the softness of love when she saw Jude, and
she bent her eyes languishingly upon him.  The animals took advantage
of the pause by doubling and bolting out of the way.

"They were only put in this morning!" she cried, stimulated to pursue
in spite of her lover's presence.  "They were drove from Spaddleholt
Farm only yesterday, where Father bought 'em at a stiff price enough.
They are wanting to get home again, the stupid toads!  Will you shut
the garden gate, dear, and help me to get 'em in.  There are no men
folk at home, only Mother, and they'll be lost if we don't mind."

He set himself to assist, and dodged this way and that over the
potato rows and the cabbages.  Every now and then they ran together,
when he caught her for a moment and kissed her.  The first pig was
got back promptly; the second with some difficulty; the third a
long-legged creature, was more obstinate and agile.  He plunged
through a hole in the garden hedge, and into the lane.

"He'll be lost if I don't follow 'n!" said she.  "Come along with
me!"

She rushed in full pursuit out of the garden, Jude alongside her,
barely contriving to keep the fugitive in sight.  Occasionally they
would shout to some boy to stop the animal, but he always wriggled
past and ran on as before.

"Let me take your hand, darling," said Jude.  "You are getting out of
breath."  She gave him her now hot hand with apparent willingness,
and they trotted along together.

"This comes of driving 'em home," she remarked.  "They always know
the way back if you do that.  They ought to have been carted over."

By this time the pig had reached an unfastened gate admitting to the
open down, across which he sped with all the agility his little legs
afforded.  As soon as the pursuers had entered and ascended to the
top of the high ground it became apparent that they would have to run
all the way to the farmer's if they wished to get at him.  From this
summit he could be seen as a minute speck, following an unerring line
towards his old home.

"It is no good!" cried Arabella.  "He'll be there long before we get
there.  It don't matter now we know he's not lost or stolen on the
way.  They'll see it is ours, and send un back.  Oh dear, how hot I
be!"

Without relinquishing her hold of Jude's hand she swerved aside and
flung herself down on the sod under a stunted thorn, precipitately
pulling Jude on to his knees at the same time.

"Oh, I ask pardon--I nearly threw you down, didn't I!  But I am so
tired!"

She lay supine, and straight as an arrow, on the sloping sod of this
hill-top, gazing up into the blue miles of sky, and still retaining
her warm hold of Jude's hand.  He reclined on his elbow near her.

"We've run all this way for nothing," she went on, her form heaving
and falling in quick pants, her face flushed, her full red lips
parted, and a fine dew of perspiration on her skin.  "Well--why don't
you speak, deary?"

"I'm blown too.  It was all up hill."

They were in absolute solitude--the most apparent of all solitudes,
that of empty surrounding space.  Nobody could be nearer than a mile
to them without their seeing him.  They were, in fact, on one of the
summits of the county, and the distant landscape around Christminster
could be discerned from where they lay.  But Jude did not think of
that then.

"Oh, I can see such a pretty thing up this tree," said Arabella.  "A
sort of a--caterpillar, of the most loveliest green and yellow you
ever came across!"

"Where?" said Jude, sitting up.

"You can't see him there--you must come here," said she.

He bent nearer and put his head in front of hers.  "No--I can't see
it," he said.

"Why, on the limb there where it branches off--close to the moving
leaf--there!"  She gently pulled him down beside her.

"I don't see it," he repeated, the back of his head against her
cheek.  "But I can, perhaps, standing up."  He stood accordingly,
placing himself in the direct line of her gaze.

"How stupid you are!" she said crossly, turning away her face.

"I don't care to see it, dear: why should I?" he replied looking
down upon her.  "Get up, Abby."

"Why?"

"I want you to let me kiss you.  I've been waiting to ever so long!"

She rolled round her face, remained a moment looking deedily aslant
at him; then with a slight curl of the lip sprang to her feet, and
exclaiming abruptly "I must mizzle!" walked off quickly homeward.
Jude followed and rejoined her.

"Just one!" he coaxed.

"Shan't!" she said.

He, surprised: "What's the matter?"

She kept her two lips resentfully together, and Jude followed her
like a pet lamb till she slackened her pace and walked beside him,
talking calmly on indifferent subjects, and always checking him if
he tried to take her hand or clasp her waist.  Thus they descended
to the precincts of her father's homestead, and Arabella went in,
nodding good-bye to him with a supercilious, affronted air.

"I expect I took too much liberty with her, somehow," Jude said to
himself, as he withdrew with a sigh and went on to Marygreen.

On Sunday morning the interior of Arabella's home was, as usual,
the scene of a grand weekly cooking, the preparation of the special
Sunday dinner.  Her father was shaving before a little glass hung on
the mullion of the window, and her mother and Arabella herself were
shelling beans hard by.  A neighbour passed on her way home from
morning service at the nearest church, and seeing Donn engaged at
the window with the razor, nodded and came in.

She at once spoke playfully to Arabella: "I zeed 'ee running with
'un--hee-hee! I hope 'tis coming to something?"

Arabella merely threw a look of consciousness into her face without
raising her eyes.

"He's for Christminster, I hear, as soon as he can get there."

"Have you heard that lately--quite lately?" asked Arabella with a
jealous, tigerish indrawing of breath.

"Oh no!  But it has been known a long time that it is his plan.  He's
on'y waiting here for an opening.  Ah well: he must walk about with
somebody, I s'pose.  Young men don't mean much now-a-days. 'Tis a sip
here and a sip there with 'em.  'Twas different in my time."

When the gossip had departed Arabella said suddenly to her mother:
"I want you and Father to go and inquire how the Edlins be, this
evening after tea.  Or no--there's evening service at Fensworth--you
can walk to that."

"Oh?  What's up to-night, then?"

"Nothing.  Only I want the house to myself.  He's shy; and I can't
get un to come in when you are here.  I shall let him slip through my
fingers if I don't mind, much as I care for 'n!"

"If it is fine we med as well go, since you wish."

In the afternoon Arabella met and walked with Jude, who had now
for weeks ceased to look into a book of Greek, Latin, or any other
tongue.  They wandered up the slopes till they reached the green
track along the ridge, which they followed to the circular British
earth-bank adjoining, Jude thinking of the great age of the trackway,
and of the drovers who had frequented it, probably before the Romans
knew the country.  Up from the level lands below them floated the
chime of church bells.  Presently they were reduced to one note,
which quickened, and stopped.

"Now we'll go back," said Arabella, who had attended to the sounds.

Jude assented.  So long as he was near her he minded little where he
was.  When they arrived at her house he said lingeringly: "I won't
come in.  Why are you in such a hurry to go in to-night?  It is not
near dark."

"Wait a moment," said she.  She tried the handle of the door and
found it locked.

"Ah--they are gone to church," she added.  And searching behind the
scraper she found the key and unlocked the door.  "Now, you'll come
in a moment?" she asked lightly.  "We shall be all alone."

"Certainly," said Jude with alacrity, the case being unexpectedly
altered.

Indoors they went.  Did he want any tea?  No, it was too late: he
would rather sit and talk to her.  She took off her jacket and hat,
and they sat down--naturally enough close together.

"Don't touch me, please," she said softly.  "I am part egg-shell. Or
perhaps I had better put it in a safe place."  She began unfastening
the collar of her gown.

"What is it?" said her lover.

"An egg--a cochin's egg.  I am hatching a very rare sort.  I carry it
about everywhere with me, and it will get hatched in less than three
weeks."

"Where do you carry it?"

"Just here."  She put her hand into her bosom and drew out the egg,
which was wrapped in wool, outside it being a piece of pig's bladder,
in case of accidents.  Having exhibited it to him she put it back,
"Now mind you don't come near me.  I don't want to get it broke, and
have to begin another."

"Why do you do such a strange thing?"

"It's an old custom.  I suppose it is natural for a woman to want to
bring live things into the world."

"It is very awkward for me just now," he said, laughing.

"It serves you right.  There--that's all you can have of me"

She had turned round her chair, and, reaching over the back of it,
presented her cheek to him gingerly.

"That's very shabby of you!"

"You should have catched me a minute ago when I had put the egg down!
There!" she said defiantly, "I am without it now!"  She had quickly
withdrawn the egg a second time; but before he could quite reach her
she had put it back as quickly, laughing with the excitement of her
strategy.  Then there was a little struggle, Jude making a plunge for
it and capturing it triumphantly.  Her face flushed; and becoming
suddenly conscious he flushed also.

They looked at each other, panting; till he rose and said: "One kiss,
now I can do it without damage to property; and I'll go!"

But she had jumped up too.  "You must find me first!" she cried.

Her lover followed her as she withdrew.  It was now dark inside the
room, and the window being small he could not discover for a long
time what had become of her, till a laugh revealed her to have rushed
up the stairs, whither Jude rushed at her heels.

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

completion: One weekend as he walks home from Alfredston, Jude makes an accounting of what he has accomplished to the age of nineteen. He believes he has some fluency in Latin and Greek, both Homeric and Biblical; he has studied some mathematics, theology, and history. What he does not yet know he will learn at Christminster, where books and instruction await him. As soon as he saves more money he will be off. He dreams of getting his D.D. and becoming a bishop or perhaps an archdeacon. He is brought back to reality by being hit on the ear by something, and he realizes that on the other side of the hedge is a pig farm and he hears girls' voices. After a bantering conversation as to who threw the pig's offal at him, Jude asks one of the three girls if she wants to meet him. They do meet on a plank bridge across the stream alongside which the girls have been working; the girl is Arabella Donn. Jude finds her attractive, aware of girls as such for the first time. Arabella easily maneuvers Jude into calling on her the next day, a Sunday. When he walks off again, his single-minded concentration on getting to Christminster fades before the onrush of new emotions. On Sunday afternoon, which he has set aside to read in his new Greek Testament, Jude easily convinces himself to keep his date with Arabella. In going for a walk they pass the Brown House, from which eminence Jude has often looked out at Christminster. Walking farther than intended, they stop at an inn for tea, sitting in a room on the wall of which is a picture of Samson and Delilah. Unable to get tea, they settle for beer, and Jude is surprised at Arabella's knowledge of its ingredients. They then walk to Arabella's house in the dark, several times stopping to kiss, Jude finally holding her close as they walk. As he walks home later, Jude is impatient of the fact that he must wait a whole week to see her again. Next day, Arabella declares to her two girl friends she wants to marry Jude, and they tease her because she says she doesn't know how to make sure she gets him. One of them whispers to her, and she obviously has told Arabella to let Jude get her pregnant. Passing the Donn farm one weekend on his way home from Alfredston. Jude encounters Arabella chasing some newly acquired pigs which have got out of the sty. Giving up the chase of the last one, they lie down on a hilltop, and when Arabella can't get Jude to caress her as she wishes she pretends to be affronted and goes off home. When the next day, Sunday, Arabella hears talk of Jude's going to Christminster, she decides to get him to make love to her, in short, to carry out the plan suggested by her girl friends. She arranges to get her parents out of the house that evening, and when she and Jude are alone in the house she teases him with a cochin's egg she is carrying in her bosom to hatch, an old custom, she says. Exciting Jude by removing it and replacing it several times, Arabella gets him to pursue her. She disappears upstairs and Jude follows her. Obviously they make love.


prompt:
Chapter: It was some two months later in the year, and the pair had met
constantly during the interval.  Arabella seemed dissatisfied; she
was always imagining, and waiting, and wondering.

One day she met the itinerant Vilbert.  She, like all the cottagers
thereabout, knew the quack well, and she began telling him of her
experiences.  Arabella had been gloomy, but before he left her she
had grown brighter.  That evening she kept an appointment with Jude,
who seemed sad.

"I am going away," he said to her.  "I think I ought to go.  I think
it will be better both for you and for me.  I wish some things had
never begun!  I was much to blame, I know.  But it is never too late
to mend."

Arabella began to cry.  "How do you know it is not too late?" she
said.  "That's all very well to say!  I haven't told you yet!" and
she looked into his face with streaming eyes.

"What?" he asked, turning pale.  "Not...?"

"Yes!  And what shall I do if you desert me?"

"Oh, Arabella--how can you say that, my dear!  You KNOW I wouldn't
desert you!"

"Well then--"

"I have next to no wages as yet, you know; or perhaps I should have
thought of this before...  But, of course if that's the case, we must
marry!  What other thing do you think I could dream of doing?"

"I thought--I thought, deary, perhaps you would go away all the more
for that, and leave me to face it alone!"

"You knew better!  Of course I never dreamt six months ago, or even
three, of marrying.  It is a complete smashing up of my plans--I mean
my plans before I knew you, my dear.  But what are they, after all!
Dreams about books, and degrees, and impossible fellowships, and all
that.  Certainly we'll marry: we must!"

That night he went out alone, and walked in the dark self-communing.
He knew well, too well, in the secret centre of his brain, that
Arabella was not worth a great deal as a specimen of womankind.
Yet, such being the custom of the rural districts among honourable
young men who had drifted so far into intimacy with a woman as he
unfortunately had done, he was ready to abide by what he had said,
and take the consequences.  For his own soothing he kept up a
factitious belief in her.  His idea of her was the thing of most
consequence, not Arabella herself, he sometimes said laconically.

The banns were put in and published the very next Sunday.  The people
of the parish all said what a simple fool young Fawley was.  All his
reading had only come to this, that he would have to sell his books
to buy saucepans.  Those who guessed the probable state of affairs,
Arabella's parents being among them, declared that it was the sort of
conduct they would have expected of such an honest young man as Jude
in reparation of the wrong he had done his innocent sweetheart.  The
parson who married them seemed to think it satisfactory too.  And so,
standing before the aforesaid officiator, the two swore that at every
other time of their lives till death took them, they would assuredly
believe, feel, and desire precisely as they had believed, felt, and
desired during the few preceding weeks.  What was as remarkable
as the undertaking itself was the fact that nobody seemed at all
surprised at what they swore.

Fawley's aunt being a baker she made him a bride-cake, saying
bitterly that it was the last thing she could do for him, poor silly
fellow; and that it would have been far better if, instead of his
living to trouble her, he had gone underground years before with his
father and mother.  Of this cake Arabella took some slices, wrapped
them up in white note-paper, and sent them to her companions in the
pork-dressing business, Anny and Sarah, labelling each packet "_In
remembrance of good advice_."

The prospects of the newly married couple were certainly not very
brilliant even to the most sanguine mind.  He, a stone-mason's
apprentice, nineteen years of age, was working for half wages till
he should be out of his time.  His wife was absolutely useless in a
town-lodging, where he at first had considered it would be necessary
for them to live.  But the urgent need of adding to income in ever so
little a degree caused him to take a lonely roadside cottage between
the Brown House and Marygreen, that he might have the profits of a
vegetable garden, and utilize her past experiences by letting her
keep a pig.  But it was not the sort of life he had bargained for,
and it was a long way to walk to and from Alfredston every day.
Arabella, however, felt that all these make-shifts were temporary;
she had gained a husband; that was the thing--a husband with a lot
of earning power in him for buying her frocks and hats when he should
begin to get frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw
aside those stupid books for practical undertakings.

So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage, giving
up his old room at his aunt's--where so much of the hard labour at
Greek and Latin had been carried on.

A little chill overspread him at her first unrobing.  A long tail of
hair, which Arabella wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back
of her head, was deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon
the looking-glass which he had bought her.

"What--it wasn't your own?" he said, with a sudden distaste for her.

"Oh no--it never is nowadays with the better class."

"Nonsense!  Perhaps not in towns.  But in the country it is supposed
to be different.  Besides, you've enough of your own, surely?"

"Yes, enough as country notions go.  But in town the men expect more,
and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham--"

"Barmaid at Aldbrickham?"

"Well, not exactly barmaid--I used to draw the drink at a
public-house there--just for a little time; that was all.  Some
people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy.
The more you have the better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town
than all your Christminsters.  Every lady of position wears false
hair--the barber's assistant told me so."

Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be
true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls
would and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing
their simplicity of life and embellishments.  Others, alas, had an
instinct towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts
in counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it.  However, perhaps there
was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to
think no more of it.

A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few
weeks, even though the prospects of the household ways and means
are cloudy.  There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and
her manner to her acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off
the gloom of facts, and renders even the humblest bride independent
awhile of the real.  Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of
Alfredston one market-day with this quality in her carriage when she
met Anny her former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.

As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them
without saying it.

"So it turned out a good plan, you see!" remarked the girl to the
wife.  "I knew it would with such as him.  He's a dear good fellow,
and you ought to be proud of un."

"I am," said Mrs. Fawley quietly.

"And when do you expect?"

"Ssh!  Not at all."

"What!"

"I was mistaken."

"Oh, Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one!  Mistaken! well, that's
clever--it's a real stroke of genius!  It is a thing I never thought
o', wi' all my experience!  I never thought beyond bringing about the
real thing--not that one could sham it!"

"Don't you be too quick to cry sham!  'Twasn't sham.  I didn't know."

"My word--won't he be in a taking!  He'll give it to 'ee o' Saturday
nights!  Whatever it was, he'll say it was a trick--a double one, by
the Lord!"

"I'll own to the first, but not to the second... Pooh--he won't
care!  He'll be glad I was wrong in what I said.  He'll shake down,
bless 'ee--men always do.  What can 'em do otherwise?  Married is
married."

Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella approached
the time when in the natural course of things she would have to
reveal that the alarm she had raised had been without foundation.
The occasion was one evening at bedtime, and they were in their
chamber in the lonely cottage by the wayside to which Jude walked
home from his work every day.  He had worked hard the whole twelve
hours, and had retired to rest before his wife.  When she came into
the room he was between sleeping and waking, and was barely conscious
of her undressing before the little looking-glass as he lay.

One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition.  Her face
being reflected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that she
was amusing herself by artificially producing in each cheek the
dimple before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she was
mistress, effecting it by a momentary suction.  It seemed to him for
the first time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her face
during his intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in the
earlier weeks of their acquaintance.

"Don't do that, Arabella!" he said suddenly.  "There is no harm in
it, but--I don't like to see you."

She turned and laughed.  "Lord, I didn't know you were awake!" she
said.  "How countrified you are!  That's nothing."

"Where did you learn it?"

"Nowhere that I know of.  They used to stay without any trouble when
I was at the public-house; but now they won't.  My face was fatter
then."

"I don't care about dimples.  I don't think they improve a
woman--particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like
you."

"Most men think otherwise."

"I don't care what most men think, if they do.  How do you know?"

"I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room."

"Ah--that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about
the adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday
evening.  I thought when I married you that you had always lived in
your father's house."

"You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little
more finished than I could have been by staying where I was born.
There was not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I
went away for three months."

"You'll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won't you?"

"How do you mean?"

"Why, of course--little things to make."

"Oh."

"When will it be?  Can't you tell me exactly, instead of in such
general terms as you have used?"

"Tell you?"

"Yes--the date."

"There's nothing to tell.  I made a mistake."

"What?"

"It was a mistake."

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her.  "How can that be?"

"Women fancy wrong things sometimes."

"But--! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of
furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn't have hurried on our
affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready,
if it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary
to save you, ready or no...  Good God!"

"Don't take on, dear.  What's done can't be undone."

"I have no more to say!"

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence
between them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a
different eye.  As to the point in question he was compelled to
accept her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted
otherwise while ordinary notions prevailed.  But how came they to
prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social
ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes
involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one
opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of
contributing his units of work to the general progress of his
generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory
instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be
only at the most called weakness.  He was inclined to inquire what he
had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught
in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a
lifetime?  There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the
immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent.  But
the marriage remained.

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

completion: Two months later, Arabella tells Jude she is pregnant, and though he has said it is time for him to leave for Christminster he promises to marry her, speaking of his aspirations as impossible dreams. They marry and go to live in a cottage alongside the road between the Brown House and Marygreen. Jude quickly discovers several things about his wife: that she wears false hair, that she was once a barmaid, that the dimples in her cheeks are artificially produced. After admitting to one of her friends that she isn't pregnant at all, Arabella is apprehensive about telling Jude. When she does, he sees how unnecessary the marriage is; Arabella is complacent in her legal status. He wonders to himself about the justice of a society that causes an individual to have to forego his highest aspirations.


prompt:
Chapter: The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had
fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering
was timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so
that Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter
of a day.

The night had seemed strangely silent.  Jude looked out of the window
long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with
snow--snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still
falling.

"I'm afraid the pig-killer won't be able to come," he said to
Arabella.

"Oh, he'll come.  You must get up and make the water hot, if you want
Challow to scald him.  Though I like singeing best."

"I'll get up," said Jude.  "I like the way of my own county."

He went downstairs, lit the fire under the copper, and began feeding
it with bean-stalks, all the time without a candle, the blaze
flinging a cheerful shine into the room; though for him the sense of
cheerfulness was lessened by thoughts on the reason of that blaze--to
heat water to scald the bristles from the body of an animal that as
yet lived, and whose voice could be continually heard from a corner
of the garden.  At half-past six, the time of appointment with the
butcher, the water boiled, and Jude's wife came downstairs.

"Is Challow come?" she asked.

"No."

They waited, and it grew lighter, with the dreary light of a snowy
dawn.  She went out, gazed along the road, and returning said, "He's
not coming.  Drunk last night, I expect.  The snow is not enough to
hinder him, surely!"

"Then we must put it off.  It is only the water boiled for nothing.
The snow may be deep in the valley."

"Can't be put off.  There's no more victuals for the pig.  He ate the
last mixing o' barleymeal yesterday morning."

"Yesterday morning?  What has he lived on since?"

"Nothing."

"What--he has been starving?"

"Yes.  We always do it the last day or two, to save bother with the
innerds.  What ignorance, not to know that!"

"That accounts for his crying so.  Poor creature!"

"Well--you must do the sticking--there's no help for it.  I'll show
you how.  Or I'll do it myself--I think I could.  Though as it is
such a big pig I had rather Challow had done it.  However, his basket
o' knives and things have been already sent on here, and we can use
'em."

"Of course you shan't do it," said Jude.  "I'll do it, since it must
be done."

He went out to the sty, shovelled away the snow for the space of a
couple of yards or more, and placed the stool in front, with the
knives and ropes at hand.  A robin peered down at the preparations
from the nearest tree, and, not liking the sinister look of the
scene, flew away, though hungry.  By this time Arabella had joined
her husband, and Jude, rope in hand, got into the sty, and noosed the
affrighted animal, who, beginning with a squeak of surprise, rose to
repeated cries of rage.  Arabella opened the sty-door, and together
they hoisted the victim on to the stool, legs upward, and while Jude
held him Arabella bound him down, looping the cord over his legs to
keep him from struggling.

The animal's note changed its quality.  It was not now rage, but the
cry of despair; long-drawn, slow and hopeless.

"Upon my soul I would sooner have gone without the pig than have had
this to do!" said Jude.  "A creature I have fed with my own hands."

"Don't be such a tender-hearted fool!  There's the sticking-knife--
the one with the point.  Now whatever you do, don't stick un too
deep."

"I'll stick him effectually, so as to make short work of it.  That's
the chief thing."

"You must not!" she cried.  "The meat must be well bled, and to do
that he must die slow.  We shall lose a shilling a score if the meat
is red and bloody!  Just touch the vein, that's all.  I was brought
up to it, and I know.  Every good butcher keeps un bleeding long.
He ought to be eight or ten minutes dying, at least."

"He shall not be half a minute if I can help it, however the meat may
look," said Jude determinedly.  Scraping the bristles from the pig's
upturned throat, as he had seen the butchers do, he slit the fat;
then plunged in the knife with all his might.

"'Od damn it all!" she cried, "that ever I should say it!  You've
over-stuck un!  And I telling you all the time--"

"Do be quiet, Arabella, and have a little pity on the creature!"

"Hold up the pail to catch the blood, and don't talk!"

However unworkmanlike the deed, it had been mercifully done.  The
blood flowed out in a torrent instead of in the trickling stream she
had desired.  The dying animal's cry assumed its third and final
tone, the shriek of agony; his glazing eyes riveting themselves on
Arabella with the eloquently keen reproach of a creature recognizing
at last the treachery of those who had seemed his only friends.

"Make un stop that!" said Arabella.  "Such a noise will bring
somebody or other up here, and I don't want people to know we are
doing it ourselves."  Picking up the knife from the ground whereon
Jude had flung it, she slipped it into the gash, and slit the
windpipe.  The pig was instantly silent, his dying breath coming
through the hole.

"That's better," she said.

"It is a hateful business!" said he.

"Pigs must be killed."

The animal heaved in a final convulsion, and, despite the rope,
kicked out with all his last strength.  A tablespoonful of black
clot came forth, the trickling of red blood having ceased for some
seconds.

"That's it; now he'll go," said she.  "Artful creatures--they always
keep back a drop like that as long as they can!"

The last plunge had come so unexpectedly as to make Jude stagger, and
in recovering himself he kicked over the vessel in which the blood
had been caught.

"There!" she cried, thoroughly in a passion.  "Now I can't make any
blackpot.  There's a waste, all through you!"

Jude put the pail upright, but only about a third of the whole
steaming liquid was left in it, the main part being splashed over
the snow, and forming a dismal, sordid, ugly spectacle--to those who
saw it as other than an ordinary obtaining of meat.  The lips and
nostrils of the animal turned livid, then white, and the muscles of
his limbs relaxed.

"Thank God!" Jude said.  "He's dead."

"What's God got to do with such a messy job as a pig-killing, I
should like to know!" she said scornfully.  "Poor folks must live."

"I know, I know," said he.  "I don't scold you."

Suddenly they became aware of a voice at hand.

"Well done, young married volk!  I couldn't have carried it out much
better myself, cuss me if I could!"  The voice, which was husky,
came from the garden-gate, and looking up from the scene of slaughter
they saw the burly form of Mr. Challow leaning over the gate,
critically surveying their performance.

"'Tis well for 'ee to stand there and glane!" said Arabella.  "Owing
to your being late the meat is blooded and half spoiled! 'Twon't
fetch so much by a shilling a score!"

Challow expressed his contrition.  "You should have waited a bit"
he said, shaking his head, "and not have done this--in the delicate
state, too, that you be in at present, ma'am.  'Tis risking yourself
too much."

"You needn't be concerned about that," said Arabella, laughing.
Jude too laughed, but there was a strong flavour of bitterness in
his amusement.

Challow made up for his neglect of the killing by zeal in the
scalding and scraping.  Jude felt dissatisfied with himself as a man
at what he had done, though aware of his lack of common sense, and
that the deed would have amounted to the same thing if carried out by
deputy.  The white snow, stained with the blood of his fellow-mortal,
wore an illogical look to him as a lover of justice, not to say a
Christian; but he could not see how the matter was to be mended.  No
doubt he was, as his wife had called him, a tender-hearted fool.

He did not like the road to Alfredston now.  It stared him cynically
in the face.  The wayside objects reminded him so much of his
courtship of his wife that, to keep them out of his eyes, he
read whenever he could as he walked to and from his work.  Yet
he sometimes felt that by caring for books he was not escaping
common-place nor gaining rare ideas, every working-man being of that
taste now.  When passing near the spot by the stream on which he had
first made her acquaintance he one day heard voices just as he had
done at that earlier time.  One of the girls who had been Arabella's
companions was talking to a friend in a shed, himself being the
subject of discourse, possibly because they had seen him in the
distance.  They were quite unaware that the shed-walls were so thin
that he could hear their words as he passed.

"Howsomever, 'twas I put her up to it!  'Nothing venture nothing
have,' I said.  If I hadn't she'd no more have been his mis'ess than
I."

"'Tis my belief she knew there was nothing the matter when she told
him she was..."

What had Arabella been put up to by this woman, so that he should
make her his "mis'ess," otherwise wife?  The suggestion was horridly
unpleasant, and it rankled in his mind so much that instead of
entering his own cottage when he reached it he flung his basket
inside the garden-gate and passed on, determined to go and see his
old aunt and get some supper there.

This made his arrival home rather late.  Arabella however, was busy
melting down lard from fat of the deceased pig, for she had been out
on a jaunt all day, and so delayed her work.  Dreading lest what he
had heard should lead him to say something regrettable to her he
spoke little.  But Arabella was very talkative, and said among other
things that she wanted some money.  Seeing the book sticking out of
his pocket she added that he ought to earn more.

"An apprentice's wages are not meant to be enough to keep a wife on,
as a rule, my dear."

"Then you shouldn't have had one."

"Come, Arabella!  That's too bad, when you know how it came about."

"I'll declare afore Heaven that I thought what I told you was true.
Doctor Vilbert thought so.  It was a good job for you that it wasn't
so!"

"I don't mean that," he said hastily.  "I mean before that time.
I know it was not your fault; but those women friends of yours gave
you bad advice.  If they hadn't, or you hadn't taken it, we should at
this moment have been free from a bond which, not to mince matters,
galls both of us devilishly.  It may be very sad, but it is true."

"Who's been telling you about my friends?  What advice?  I insist
upon you telling me."

"Pooh--I'd rather not."

"But you shall--you ought to.  It is mean of 'ee not to!"

"Very well."  And he hinted gently what had been revealed to him.
"But I don't wish to dwell upon it.  Let us say no more about it."

Her defensive manner collapsed.  "That was nothing," she said,
laughing coldly.  "Every woman has a right to do such as that.  The
risk is hers."

"I quite deny it, Bella.  She might if no lifelong penalty attached
to it for the man, or, in his default, for herself; if the weakness
of the moment could end with the moment, or even with the year.
But when effects stretch so far she should not go and do that which
entraps a man if he is honest, or herself if he is otherwise."

"What ought I to have done?"

"Given me time...  Why do you fuss yourself about melting down that
pig's fat to-night?  Please put it away!"

"Then I must do it to-morrow morning.  It won't keep."

"Very well--do."

Next morning, which was Sunday, she resumed operations about ten
o'clock; and the renewed work recalled the conversation which had
accompanied it the night before, and put her back into the same
intractable temper.

"That's the story about me in Marygreen, is it--that I entrapped 'ee?
Much of a catch you were, Lord send!"  As she warmed she saw some of
Jude's dear ancient classics on a table where they ought not to have
been laid.  "I won't have them books here in the way!" she cried
petulantly; and seizing them one by one she began throwing them upon
the floor.

"Leave my books alone!" he said.  "You might have thrown them
aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is
disgusting!"  In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had
become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently
left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers.  She continued
deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude,
incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave
off.  Somehow, in going so, he loosened the fastening of her hair,
and it rolled about her ears.

"Let me go!" she said.

"Promise to leave the books alone."

She hesitated.  "Let me go!" she repeated.

"Promise!"

After a pause: "I do."

Jude relinquished his hold, and she crossed the room to the door,
out of which she went with a set face, and into the highway.  Here
she began to saunter up and down, perversely pulling her hair into a
worse disorder than he had caused, and unfastening several buttons of
her gown.  It was a fine Sunday morning, dry, clear and frosty, and
the bells of Alfredston Church could be heard on the breeze from the
north.  People were going along the road, dressed in their holiday
clothes; they were mainly lovers--such pairs as Jude and Arabella
had been when they sported along the same track some months earlier.
These pedestrians turned to stare at the extraordinary spectacle she
now presented, bonnetless, her dishevelled hair blowing in the wind,
her bodice apart, her sleeves rolled above her elbows for her work,
and her hands reeking with melted fat.  One of the passers said in
mock terror: "Good Lord deliver us!"

"See how he's served me!" she cried.  "Making me work Sunday mornings
when I ought to be going to my church, and tearing my hair off my
head, and my gown off my back!"

Jude was exasperated, and went out to drag her in by main force.
Then he suddenly lost his heat.  Illuminated with the sense that all
was over between them, and that it mattered not what she did, or he,
her husband stood still, regarding her.  Their lives were ruined, he
thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union:
that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling
which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render
a lifelong comradeship tolerable.

"Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your
mother, and your father's sister ill-used her husband?" she asked.
"All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!"

Jude fixed an arrested, surprised look on her.  But she said no more,
and continued her saunter till she was tired.  He left the spot, and,
after wandering vaguely a little while, walked in the direction of
Marygreen.  Here he called upon his great-aunt, whose infirmities
daily increased.

"Aunt--did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?"
said Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.

She raised her ancient eyes under the rim of the by-gone bonnet that
she always wore.  "Who's been telling you that?" she said.

"I have heard it spoken of, and want to know all."

"You med so well, I s'pose; though your wife--I reckon 'twas
she--must have been a fool to open up that!  There isn't much to know
after all.  Your father and mother couldn't get on together, and they
parted.  It was coming home from Alfredston market, when you were a
baby--on the hill by the Brown House barn--that they had their last
difference, and took leave of one another for the last time.  Your
mother soon afterwards died--she drowned herself, in short, and your
father went away with you to South Wessex, and never came here any
more."

Jude recalled his father's silence about North Wessex and Jude's
mother, never speaking of either till his dying day.

"It was the same with your father's sister.  Her husband offended
her, and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went
away to London with her little maid.  The Fawleys were not made for
wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us.  There's sommat in our
blood that won't take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what
we do readily enough if not bound.  That's why you ought to have
hearkened to me, and not ha' married."

"Where did Father and Mother part--by the Brown House, did you say?"

"A little further on--where the road to Fenworth branches off, and
the handpost stands.  A gibbet once stood there not onconnected with
our history.  But let that be."

In the dusk of that evening Jude walked away from his old aunt's as
if to go home.  But as soon as he reached the open down he struck out
upon it till he came to a large round pond.  The frost continued,
though it was not particularly sharp, and the larger stars overhead
came out slow and flickering.  Jude put one foot on the edge of the
ice, and then the other: it cracked under his weight; but this did
not deter him.  He ploughed his way inward to the centre, the ice
making sharp noises as he went.  When just about the middle he looked
around him and gave a jump.  The cracking repeated itself; but he did
not go down.  He jumped again, but the cracking had ceased.  Jude
went back to the edge, and stepped upon the ground.

It was curious, he thought.  What was he reserved for?  He supposed
he was not a sufficiently dignified person for suicide.  Peaceful
death abhorred him as a subject, and would not take him.

What could he do of a lower kind than self-extermination; what was
there less noble, more in keeping with his present degraded position?
He could get drunk.  Of course that was it; he had forgotten.
Drinking was the regular, stereotyped resource of the despairing
worthless.  He began to see now why some men boozed at inns.  He
struck down the hill northwards and came to an obscure public-house.
On entering and sitting down the sight of the picture of Samson and
Delilah on the wall caused him to recognize the place as that he
had visited with Arabella on that first Sunday evening of their
courtship.  He called for liquor and drank briskly for an hour or
more.

Staggering homeward late that night, with all his sense of
depression gone, and his head fairly clear still, he began to laugh
boisterously, and to wonder how Arabella would receive him in his
new aspect.  The house was in darkness when he entered, and in
his stumbling state it was some time before he could get a light.
Then he found that, though the marks of pig-dressing, of fats and
scallops, were visible, the materials themselves had been taken away.
A line written by his wife on the inside of an old envelope was
pinned to the cotton blower of the fireplace:

"_Have gone to my friends.  Shall not return._"

All the next day he remained at home, and sent off the carcase of the
pig to Alfredston.  He then cleaned up the premises, locked the door,
put the key in a place she would know if she came back, and returned
to his masonry at Alfredston.

At night when he again plodded home he found she had not visited the
house.  The next day went in the same way, and the next.  Then there
came a letter from her.

That she had gone tired of him she frankly admitted.  He was such
a slow old coach, and she did not care for the sort of life he
led.  There was no prospect of his ever bettering himself or her.
She further went on to say that her parents had, as he knew, for
some time considered the question of emigrating to Australia, the
pig-jobbing business being a poor one nowadays.  They had at last
decided to go, and she proposed to go with them, if he had no
objection.  A woman of her sort would have more chance over there
than in this stupid country.

Jude replied that he had not the least objection to her going.  He
thought it a wise course, since she wished to go, and one that might
be to the advantage of both.  He enclosed in the packet containing
the letter the money that had been realized by the sale of the pig,
with all he had besides, which was not much.

From that day he heard no more of her except indirectly, though her
father and his household did not immediately leave, but waited till
his goods and other effects had been sold off.  When Jude learnt
that there was to be an auction at the house of the Donns he packed
his own household goods into a waggon, and sent them to her at the
aforesaid homestead, that she might sell them with the rest, or as
many of them as she should choose.

He then went into lodgings at Alfredston, and saw in a shopwindow the
little handbill announcing the sale of his father-in-law's furniture.
He noted its date, which came and passed without Jude's going near
the place, or perceiving that the traffic out of Alfredston by
the southern road was materially increased by the auction.  A few
days later he entered a dingy broker's shop in the main street
of the town, and amid a heterogeneous collection of saucepans, a
clothes-horse, rolling-pin, brass candlestick, swing looking-glass,
and other things at the back of the shop, evidently just brought in
from a sale, he perceived a framed photograph, which turned out to be
his own portrait.

It was one which he had had specially taken and framed by a local man
in bird's-eye maple, as a present for Arabella, and had duly given
her on their wedding-day.  On the back was still to be read, "_Jude
to Arabella_," with the date.  She must have thrown it in with the
rest of her property at the auction.

"Oh," said the broker, seeing him look at this and the other articles
in the heap, and not perceiving that the portrait was of himself,
"It is a small lot of stuff that was knocked down to me at a cottage
sale out on the road to Marygreen.  The frame is a very useful one,
if you take out the likeness. You shall have it for a shilling."

The utter death of every tender sentiment in his wife, as brought
home to him by this mute and undesigned evidence of her sale of
his portrait and gift, was the conclusive little stroke required
to demolish all sentiment in him.  He paid the shilling, took the
photograph away with him, and burnt it, frame and all, when he
reached his lodging.

Two or three days later he heard that Arabella and her parents had
departed.  He had sent a message offering to see her for a formal
leave-taking, but she had said that it would be better otherwise,
since she was bent on going, which perhaps was true.  On the evening
following their emigration, when his day's work was done, he came out
of doors after supper, and strolled in the starlight along the too
familiar road towards the upland whereon had been experienced the
chief emotions of his life.  It seemed to be his own again.

He could not realize himself.  On the old track he seemed to be a
boy still, hardly a day older than when he had stood dreaming at the
top of that hill, inwardly fired for the first time with ardours for
Christminster and scholarship.  "Yet I am a man," he said.  "I have
a wife.  More, I have arrived at the still riper stage of having
disagreed with her, disliked her, had a scuffle with her, and parted
from her."

He remembered then that he was standing not far from the spot at
which the parting between his father and his mother was said to have
occurred.

A little further on was the summit whence Christminster, or what he
had taken for that city, had seemed to be visible.  A milestone, now
as always, stood at the roadside hard by.  Jude drew near it, and
felt rather than read the mileage to the city.  He remembered that
once on his way home he had proudly cut with his keen new chisel an
inscription on the back of that milestone, embodying his aspirations.
It had been done in the first week of his apprenticeship, before
he had been diverted from his purposes by an unsuitable woman.  He
wondered if the inscription were legible still, and going to the back
of the milestone brushed away the nettles.  By the light of a match
he could still discern what he had cut so enthusiastically so long
ago:

            THITHER
             J. F.
   [with a pointing finger]

The sight of it, unimpaired, within its screen of grass and nettles,
lit in his soul a spark of the old fire.  Surely his plan should
be to move onward through good and ill--to avoid morbid sorrow
even though he did see uglinesses in the world?  _Bene agere et
loetari_--to do good cheerfully--which he had heard to be the
philosophy of one Spinoza, might be his own even now.

He might battle with his evil star, and follow out his original
intention.

By moving to a spot a little way off he uncovered the horizon in a
north-easterly direction.  There actually rose the faint halo, a
small dim nebulousness, hardly recognizable save by the eye of faith.
It was enough for him.  He would go to Christminster as soon as the
term of his apprenticeship expired.

He returned to his lodgings in a better mood, and said his prayers.

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

completion: When the pig killer doesn't come to kill the pig Jude and Arabella have been fattening, Jude is forced to do the job. He wants to kill it quickly so as to be merciful, but Arabella insists it should slowly bleed to death so that the meat will be better. Jude sticks the pig deeply and it bleeds quickly, much to Arabella's disgust and anger. Coming home from work that day, he overhears Arabella's girl friend tell another girl she put Arabella up to tricking Jude. When he confronts Arabella with this, she makes light of it, saying many girls work the same deception. But Jude insists she was wrong to so trap him into a marriage satisfactory to neither of them. When the next morning, a Sunday, in the course of her work with the pig's fat Arabella tosses some of Jude's books aside, he gets angry at her. She leaves the house and, disheveled, walks up and down the road in front, lamenting her ill-treatment and accusing Jude of being like his father and his father's sister in their relationship to their spouses. When Jude goes to his aunt to ask her about this, she tells him his parents couldn't get along and separated, his mother later drowning herself. His father's sister couldn't get along with her husband and eventually left him, taking her daughter Sue with her. In despair Jude walks out onto the ice of a pond as if to drown himself, but the ice doesn't break. He decides to do something more suitable to his degraded state and goes to get drunk. Coming home later, he discovers Arabella has gone, leaving him a note that she will not return. In a few days she writes to say she wants no more of him and she is going with her family to Australia. Jude replies that he has no objection and sends her money as well as his household goods for her to include in the auction the family is going to have. Later, in a secondhand store he discovers among the goods from the sale that the dealer has bought a photograph he gave Arabella. This puts an end to whatever feeling he may yet have for her. On a stroll one evening he comes to the place on the ridge-track from which he has so often looked for Christminster and realizes that though much has happened he has still not achieved his ambitions. These ambitions are reawakened by his seeing on the back of a milestone nearby an inscription he carved to symbolize his goal in life. He decides to go to Christminster as soon as his apprenticeship has ended.


prompt:
Chapter: The next noteworthy move in Jude's life was that in which he appeared
gliding steadily onward through a dusky landscape of some three
years' later leafage than had graced his courtship of Arabella,
and the disruption of his coarse conjugal life with her.  He was
walking towards Christminster City, at a point a mile or two to the
south-west of it.

He had at last found himself clear of Marygreen and Alfredston: he
was out of his apprenticeship, and with his tools at his back seemed
to be in the way of making a new start--the start to which, barring
the interruption involved in his intimacy and married experience with
Arabella, he had been looking forward for about ten years.

Jude would now have been described as a young man with a forcible,
meditative, and earnest rather than handsome cast of countenance.
He was of dark complexion, with dark harmonizing eyes, and he wore
a closely trimmed black beard of more advanced growth than is usual
at his age; this, with his great mass of black curly hair, was some
trouble to him in combing and washing out the stone-dust that settled
on it in the pursuit of his trade.  His capabilities in the latter,
having been acquired in the country, were of an all-round sort,
including monumental stone-cutting, gothic free-stone work for the
restoration of churches, and carving of a general kind.  In London
he would probably have become specialized and have made himself a
"moulding mason," a "foliage sculptor"--perhaps a "statuary."

He had that afternoon driven in a cart from Alfredston to the village
nearest the city in this direction, and was now walking the remaining
four miles rather from choice than from necessity, having always
fancied himself arriving thus.

The ultimate impulse to come had had a curious origin--one more
nearly related to the emotional side of him than to the intellectual,
as is often the case with young men.  One day while in lodgings at
Alfredston he had gone to Marygreen to see his old aunt, and had
observed between the brass candlesticks on her mantlepiece the
photograph of a pretty girlish face, in a broad hat with radiating
folds under the brim like the rays of a halo.  He had asked who she
was.  His grand-aunt had gruffly replied that she was his cousin
Sue Bridehead, of the inimical branch of the family; and on further
questioning the old woman had replied that the girl lived in
Christminster, though she did not know where, or what she was doing.

His aunt would not give him the photograph.  But it haunted him; and
ultimately formed a quickening ingredient in his latent intent of
following his friend the school master thither.

He now paused at the top of a crooked and gentle declivity,
and obtained his first near view of the city.  Grey-stoned and
dun-roofed, it stood within hail of the Wessex border, and almost
with the tip of one small toe within it, at the northernmost point of
the crinkled line along which the leisurely Thames strokes the fields
of that ancient kingdom.  The buildings now lay quiet in the sunset,
a vane here and there on their many spires and domes giving sparkle
to a picture of sober secondary and tertiary hues.

Reaching the bottom he moved along the level way between pollard
willows growing indistinct in the twilight, and soon confronted the
outmost lamps of the town--some of those lamps which had sent into
the sky the gleam and glory that caught his strained gaze in his days
of dreaming, so many years ago.  They winked their yellow eyes at him
dubiously, and as if, though they had been awaiting him all these
years in disappointment at his tarrying, they did not much want him
now.

He was a species of Dick Whittington whose spirit was touched to
finer issues than a mere material gain.  He went along the outlying
streets with the cautious tread of an explorer.  He saw nothing of
the real city in the suburbs on this side.  His first want being a
lodging he scrutinized carefully such localities as seemed to offer
on inexpensive terms the modest type of accommodation he demanded;
and after inquiry took a room in a suburb nicknamed "Beersheba,"
though he did not know this at the time.  Here he installed himself,
and having had some tea sallied forth.

It was a windy, whispering, moonless night.  To guide himself he
opened under a lamp a map he had brought.  The breeze ruffled and
fluttered it, but he could see enough to decide on the direction he
should take to reach the heart of the place.

After many turnings he came up to the first ancient mediaeval pile
that he had encountered.  It was a college, as he could see by the
gateway.  He entered it, walked round, and penetrated to dark corners
which no lamplight reached.  Close to this college was another; and
a little further on another; and then he began to be encircled as it
were with the breath and sentiment of the venerable city.  When he
passed objects out of harmony with its general expression he allowed
his eyes to slip over them as if he did not see them.

A bell began clanging, and he listened till a hundred-and-one strokes
had sounded.  He must have made a mistake, he thought: it was meant
for a hundred.

When the gates were shut, and he could no longer get into the
quadrangles, he rambled under the walls and doorways, feeling with
his fingers the contours of their mouldings and carving.  The minutes
passed, fewer and fewer people were visible, and still he serpentined
among the shadows, for had he not imagined these scenes through
ten bygone years, and what mattered a night's rest for once?  High
against the black sky the flash of a lamp would show crocketed
pinnacles and indented battlements.  Down obscure alleys, apparently
never trodden now by the foot of man, and whose very existence seemed
to be forgotten, there would jut into the path porticoes, oriels,
doorways of enriched and florid middle-age design, their extinct air
being accentuated by the rottenness of the stones.  It seemed
impossible that modern thought could house itself in such decrepit
and superseded chambers.

Knowing not a human being here, Jude began to be impressed with
the isolation of his own personality, as with a self-spectre, the
sensation being that of one who walked but could not make himself
seen or heard.  He drew his breath pensively, and, seeming thus
almost his own ghost, gave his thoughts to the other ghostly
presences with which the nooks were haunted.

During the interval of preparation for this venture, since his wife
and furniture's uncompromising disappearance into space, he had read
and learnt almost all that could be read and learnt by one in his
position, of the worthies who had spent their youth within these
reverend walls, and whose souls had haunted them in their maturer
age.  Some of them, by the accidents of his reading, loomed out in
his fancy disproportionately large by comparison with the rest.  The
brushings of the wind against the angles, buttresses, and door-jambs
were as the passing of these only other inhabitants, the tappings
of each ivy leaf on its neighbour were as the mutterings of their
mournful souls, the shadows as their thin shapes in nervous movement,
making him comrades in his solitude.  In the gloom it was as if he
ran against them without feeling their bodily frames.

The streets were now deserted, but on account of these things he
could not go in.  There were poets abroad, of early date and of late,
from the friend and eulogist of Shakespeare down to him who has
recently passed into silence, and that musical one of the tribe who
is still among us.  Speculative philosophers drew along, not always
with wrinkled foreheads and hoary hair as in framed portraits, but
pink-faced, slim, and active as in youth; modern divines sheeted in
their surplices, among whom the most real to Jude Fawley were the
founders of the religious school called Tractarian; the well-known
three, the enthusiast, the poet, and the formularist, the echoes
of whose teachings had influenced him even in his obscure home.
A start of aversion appeared in his fancy to move them at sight of
those other sons of the place, the form in the full-bottomed wig,
statesman, rake, reasoner, and sceptic; the smoothly shaven historian
so ironically civil to Christianity; with others of the same
incredulous temper, who knew each quad as well as the faithful, and
took equal freedom in haunting its cloisters.

He regarded the statesmen in their various types, men of firmer
movement and less dreamy air; the scholar, the speaker, the plodder;
the man whose mind grew with his growth in years, and the man whose
mind contracted with the same.

The scientists and philologists followed on in his mind-sight in
an odd impossible combination, men of meditative faces, strained
foreheads, and weak-eyed as bats with constant research;
then official characters--such men as governor-generals and
lord-lieutenants, in whom he took little interest; chief-justices and
lord chancellors, silent thin-lipped figures of whom he knew barely
the names.  A keener regard attached to the prelates, by reason of
his own former hopes.  Of them he had an ample band--some men of
heart, others rather men of head; he who apologized for the Church
in Latin; the saintly author of the Evening Hymn; and near them the
great itinerant preacher, hymn-writer, and zealot, shadowed like Jude
by his matrimonial difficulties.

Jude found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with
them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama who apostrophizes the
audience on the other side of the footlights; till he suddenly ceased
with a start at his absurdity.  Perhaps those incoherent words of the
wanderer were heard within the walls by some student or thinker over
his lamp; and he may have raised his head, and wondered what voice it
was, and what it betokened.  Jude now perceived that, so far as solid
flesh went, he had the whole aged city to himself with the exception
of a belated townsman here and there, and that he seemed to be
catching a cold.

A voice reached him out of the shade; a real and local voice:

"You've been a-settin' a long time on that plinth-stone, young man.
What med you be up to?"

It came from a policeman who had been observing Jude without the
latter observing him.

Jude went home and to bed, after reading up a little about these men
and their several messages to the world from a book or two that he
had brought with him concerning the sons of the university.  As he
drew towards sleep various memorable words of theirs that he had
just been conning seemed spoken by them in muttering utterances;
some audible, some unintelligible to him.  One of the spectres (who
afterwards mourned Christminster as "the home of lost causes," though
Jude did not remember this) was now apostrophizing her thus:

"Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene! ...  Her ineffable charm
keeps ever calling us to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to
perfection."

Another voice was that of the Corn Law convert, whose phantom he had
just seen in the quadrangle with a great bell.  Jude thought his soul
might have been shaping the historic words of his master-speech:

"Sir, I may be wrong, but my impression is that my duty towards a
country threatened with famine requires that that which has been the
ordinary remedy under all similar circumstances should be resorted to
now, namely, that there should be free access to the food of man from
whatever quarter it may come...  Deprive me of office to-morrow, you
can never deprive me of the consciousness that I have exercised the
powers committed to me from no corrupt or interested motives, from no
desire to gratify ambition, for no personal gain."

Then the sly author of the immortal Chapter on Christianity: "How
shall we excuse the supine inattention of the Pagan and philosophic
world, to those evidences [miracles] which were presented by
Omnipotence? ...  The sages of Greece and Rome turned aside from the
awful spectacle, and appeared unconscious of any alterations in the
moral or physical government of the world."

Then the shade of the poet, the last of the optimists:

   How the world is made for each of us!

       *     *     *     *     *

   And each of the Many helps to recruit
   The life of the race by a general plan.

Then one of the three enthusiasts he had seen just now, the author of
the _Apologia_:

"My argument was ... that absolute certitude as to the truths of
natural theology was the result of an assemblage of concurring and
converging probabilities ... that probabilities which did not reach
to logical certainty might create a mental certitude."

The second of them, no polemic, murmured quieter things:

   Why should we faint, and fear to live alone,
   Since all alone, so Heaven has will'd, we die?

He likewise heard some phrases spoken by the phantom with the short
face, the genial Spectator:

"When I look upon the tombs of the great, every motion of envy dies
in me; when I read the epitaphs of the beautiful, every inordinate
desire goes out; when I meet with the grief of parents upon a
tombstone, my heart melts with compassion; when I see the tombs of
the parents themselves, I consider the vanity of grieving for those
whom we must quickly follow."

And lastly a gentle-voiced prelate spoke, during whose meek, familiar
rhyme, endeared to him from earliest childhood, Jude fell asleep:

     Teach me to live, that I may dread
     The grave as little as my bed.
     Teach me to die ...

He did not wake till morning.  The ghostly past seemed to have gone,
and everything spoke of to-day.  He started up in bed, thinking he
had overslept himself and then said:

"By Jove--I had quite forgotten my sweet-faced cousin, and that she's
here all the time! ... and my old schoolmaster, too."  His words
about his schoolmaster had, perhaps, less zest in them than his words
concerning his cousin.

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

completion: Three years later, his apprenticeship ended, Jude is on his way to Christminster. Not only have his old aspirations caused him to come; but he has seen a photograph of his cousin Sue Bridehead and has been told by his aunt that the girl lives in the city. He arrives at sunset, finds himself lodgings in an inexpensive suburb nicknamed Beersheba, and goes to look over the city. He has read and thought so much about it that as he wanders among the ancient colleges he seems to encounter the ghosts of the famous men associated with them. Back in his lodgings, before he falls asleep he seems to hear these men speak to him in words that he has read.