Chapter: How Gillingham's doubts were disposed of will most quickly appear by
passing over the series of dreary months and incidents that followed
the events of the last chapter, and coming on to a Sunday in the
February of the year following.

Sue and Jude were living in Aldbrickham, in precisely the same
relations that they had established between themselves when she
left Shaston to join him the year before.  The proceedings in the
law-courts had reached their consciousness, but as a distant sound
and an occasional missive which they hardly understood.

They had met, as usual, to breakfast together in the little house
with Jude's name on it, that he had taken at fifteen pounds a year,
with three-pounds-ten extra for rates and taxes, and furnished with
his aunt's ancient and lumbering goods, which had cost him about
their full value to bring all the way from Marygreen.  Sue kept
house, and managed everything.

As he entered the room this morning Sue held up a letter she had just
received.

"Well; and what is it about?" he said after kissing her.

"That the decree _nisi_ in the case of Phillotson _versus_ Phillotson
and Fawley, pronounced six months ago, has just been made absolute."

"Ah," said Jude, as he sat down.

The same concluding incident in Jude's suit against Arabella had
occurred about a month or two earlier.  Both cases had been too
insignificant to be reported in the papers, further than by name in
a long list of other undefended cases.

"Now then, Sue, at any rate, you can do what you like!"  He looked at
his sweetheart curiously.

"Are we--you and I--just as free now as if we had never married at
all?"

"Just as free--except, I believe, that a clergyman may object
personally to remarry you, and hand the job on to somebody else."

"But I wonder--do you think it is really so with us?  I know it is
generally.  But I have an uncomfortable feeling that my freedom has
been obtained under false pretences!"

"How?"

"Well--if the truth about us had been known, the decree wouldn't have
been pronounced.  It is only, is it, because we have made no defence,
and have led them into a false supposition?  Therefore is my freedom
lawful, however proper it may be?"

"Well--why did you let it be under false pretences?  You have only
yourself to blame," he said mischievously.

"Jude--don't! You ought not to be touchy about that still.  You must
take me as I am."

"Very well, darling: so I will.  Perhaps you were right.  As to your
question, we were not obliged to prove anything.  That was their
business.  Anyhow we are living together."

"Yes.  Though not in their sense."

"One thing is certain, that however the decree may be brought
about, a marriage is dissolved when it is dissolved.  There is this
advantage in being poor obscure people like us--that these things are
done for us in a rough and ready fashion.  It was the same with me
and Arabella.  I was afraid her criminal second marriage would have
been discovered, and she punished; but nobody took any interest in
her--nobody inquired, nobody suspected it.  If we'd been patented
nobilities we should have had infinite trouble, and days and weeks
would have been spent in investigations."

By degrees Sue acquired her lover's cheerfulness at the sense of
freedom, and proposed that they should take a walk in the fields,
even if they had to put up with a cold dinner on account of it.
Jude agreed, and Sue went up-stairs and prepared to start, putting
on a joyful coloured gown in observance of her liberty; seeing which
Jude put on a lighter tie.

"Now we'll strut arm and arm," he said, "like any other engaged
couple.  We've a legal right to."

They rambled out of the town, and along a path over the low-lying
lands that bordered it, though these were frosty now, and the
extensive seed-fields were bare of colour and produce.  The pair,
however, were so absorbed in their own situation that their
surroundings were little in their consciousness.

"Well, my dearest, the result of all this is that we can marry after
a decent interval."

"Yes; I suppose we can," said Sue, without enthusiasm.

"And aren't we going to?"

"I don't like to say no, dear Jude; but I feel just the same about
it now as I have done all along.  I have just the same dread lest an
iron contract should extinguish your tenderness for me, and mine for
you, as it did between our unfortunate parents."

"Still, what can we do?  I do love you, as you know, Sue."

"I know it abundantly.  But I think I would much rather go on living
always as lovers, as we are living now, and only meeting by day.  It
is so much sweeter--for the woman at least, and when she is sure of
the man.  And henceforward we needn't be so particular as we have
been about appearances."

"Our experiences of matrimony with others have not been encouraging,
I own," said he, with some gloom; "either owing to our own
dissatisfied, unpractical natures, or by our misfortune.  But we
two--"

"Should be two dissatisfied ones linked together, which would be
twice as bad as before...  I think I should begin to be afraid of
you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a
Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by
you--Ugh, how horrible and sordid!  Although, as you are, free, I
trust you more than any other man in the world."

"No, no--don't say I should change!" he expostulated; yet there was
misgiving in his own voice also.

"Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign
to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that
he must and shall be that person's lover.  There would be a much
likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love.  If the
marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between
the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration
of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society
as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples
than there are now.  Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring
husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the
clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets!  There'd
be little cooling then."

"Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are
not the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue.  People go
on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many
of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a
month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.  No doubt my father and
mother, and your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled
us in habits of observation.  But then they went and married just the
same, because they had ordinary passions.  But you, Sue, are such a
phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who--if you'll allow me to say
it--has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason
in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance
can't."

"Well," she sighed, "you've owned that it would probably end in
misery for us.  And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think.
Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it
for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages
it gains them sometimes--a dignity and an advantage that I am quite
willing to do without."

Jude fell back upon his old complaint--that, intimate as they were,
he had never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she
loved or could love him.  "I really fear sometimes that you cannot,"
he said, with a dubiousness approaching anger.  "And you are so
reticent.  I know that women are taught by other women that they
must never admit the full truth to a man.  But the highest form of
affection is based on full sincerity on both sides.  Not being men,
these women don't know that in looking back on those he has had
tender relations with, a man's heart returns closest to her who
was the soul of truth in her conduct.  The better class of man,
even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and parrying, is not
retained by them.  A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the game of
elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner
or later, her old admirers feel; under which they allow her to go
unlamented to her grave."

Sue, who was regarding the distance, had acquired a guilty look; and
she suddenly replied in a tragic voice: "I don't think I like you
to-day so well as I did, Jude!"

"Don't you?  Why?"

"Oh, well--you are not nice--too sermony.  Though I suppose I am so
bad and worthless that I deserve the utmost rigour of lecturing!"

"No, you are not bad.  You are a dear.  But as slippery as an eel
when I want to get a confession from you."

"Oh yes, I am bad, and obstinate, and all sorts!  It is no use your
pretending I am not!  People who are good don't want scolding as I
do...  But now that I have nobody but you, and nobody to defend me,
it is very hard that I mustn't have my own way in deciding how I'll
live with you, and whether I'll be married or no!"

"Sue, my own comrade and sweetheart, I don't want to force you either
to marry or to do the other thing--of course I don't!  It is too
wicked of you to be so pettish!  Now we won't say any more about it,
and go on just the same as we have done; and during the rest of our
walk we'll talk of the meadows only, and the floods, and the prospect
of the farmers this coming year."

After this the subject of marriage was not mentioned by them for
several days, though living as they were with only a landing between
them it was constantly in their minds.  Sue was assisting Jude very
materially now: he had latterly occupied himself on his own account
in working and lettering headstones, which he kept in a little yard
at the back of his little house, where in the intervals of domestic
duties she marked out the letters full size for him, and blacked them
in after he had cut them.  It was a lower class of handicraft than
were his former performances as a cathedral mason, and his only
patrons were the poor people who lived in his own neighbourhood,
and knew what a cheap man this "Jude Fawley: Monumental Mason"
(as he called himself on his front door) was to employ for the
simple memorials they required for their dead.  But he seemed more
independent than before, and it was the only arrangement under which
Sue, who particularly wished to be no burden on him, could render any
assistance.

 The next year in February, Jude and Sue are still at Aldbrickham, but they have not yet become lovers. Jude was divorced from Arabella two months earlier, and now news arrives that Sue's divorce from Phillotson has come through. They are now both free to marry and they both go out for a walk to celebrate their freedom. Jude raises the question of their marriage, but Sue is extremely reluctant to enter into matrimony. She prefers the present arrangement of living together as friends without any physical relations. She denounces the institution of marriage as a sordid contract and fears that such a binding agreement will extinguish all love between them. Jude laments her lack of passion and wonders about her ability to love, but he finally gives in to her and allows her to have her way. Jude continues with his job of cutting and lettering headstones, and Sue helps him with this. His new work is not as prestigious as cathedral masonry, yet he manages to support them both with his earnings.

