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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes."

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

"What!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes you have," murmured she.

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

"But I guess it.  I know nearly."

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

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

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

"Why didn't you tell me before!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Prettier than I am, no doubt!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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


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

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

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.


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

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

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

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


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

   SUSANNA FLORENCE MARY BRIDEHEAD.


Jude screwed himself up to heroic key; and replied:


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

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

   JUDE.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh--nothing!"

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

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

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

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

"That's the church," said Jude.

"Where I am going to be married?"

"Yes."

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

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

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


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


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

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

"I know you do!" said Jude.

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

"No doubt you will!"

"Was it like this when you were married?"

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

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

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

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

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

"How?" said Phillotson curiously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

