Chapter: Sue's distressful confession recurred to Jude's mind all the night as
being a sorrow indeed.

The morning after, when it was time for her to go, the neighbours saw
her companion and herself disappearing on foot down the hill path
which led into the lonely road to Alfredston.  An hour passed before
he returned along the same route, and in his face there was a look of
exaltation not unmixed with recklessness.  An incident had occurred.

They had stood parting in the silent highway, and their tense and
passionate moods had led to bewildered inquiries of each other on how
far their intimacy ought to go; till they had almost quarrelled, and
she said tearfully that it was hardly proper of him as a parson in
embryo to think of such a thing as kissing her even in farewell as he
now wished to do.  Then she had conceded that the fact of the kiss
would be nothing: all would depend upon the spirit of it.  If given
in the spirit of a cousin and a friend she saw no objection: if in
the spirit of a lover she could not permit it.  "Will you swear that
it will not be in that spirit?" she had said.

No: he would not.  And then they had turned from each other in
estrangement, and gone their several ways, till at a distance
of twenty or thirty yards both had looked round simultaneously.
That look behind was fatal to the reserve hitherto more or less
maintained.  They had quickly run back, and met, and embracing most
unpremeditatedly, kissed close and long.  When they parted for good
it was with flushed cheeks on her side, and a beating heart on his.

The kiss was a turning-point in Jude's career.  Back again in the
cottage, and left to reflection, he saw one thing: that though
his kiss of that aerial being had seemed the purest moment of his
faultful life, as long as he nourished this unlicensed tenderness it
was glaringly inconsistent for him to pursue the idea of becoming the
soldier and servant of a religion in which sexual love was regarded
as at its best a frailty, and at its worst damnation.  What Sue
had said in warmth was really the cold truth.  When to defend
his affection tooth and nail, to persist with headlong force in
impassioned attentions to her, was all he thought of, he was
condemned _ipso facto_ as a professor of the accepted school of
morals.  He was as unfit, obviously, by nature, as he had been by
social position, to fill the part of a propounder of accredited
dogma.

Strange that his first aspiration--towards academical
proficiency--had been checked by a woman, and that his second
aspiration--towards apostleship--had also been checked by a woman.
"Is it," he said, "that the women are to blame; or is it the
artificial system of things, under which the normal sex-impulses are
turned into devilish domestic gins and springs to noose and hold back
those who want to progress?"

It had been his standing desire to become a prophet, however humble,
to his struggling fellow-creatures, without any thought of personal
gain.  Yet with a wife living away from him with another husband, and
himself in love erratically, the loved one's revolt against her state
being possibly on his account, he had sunk to be barely respectable
according to regulation views.

It was not for him to consider further: he had only to confront the
obvious, which was that he had made himself quite an impostor as a
law-abiding religious teacher.

At dusk that evening he went into the garden and dug a shallow hole,
to which he brought out all the theological and ethical works that
he possessed, and had stored here.  He knew that, in this country of
true believers, most of them were not saleable at a much higher price
than waste-paper value, and preferred to get rid of them in his own
way, even if he should sacrifice a little money to the sentiment of
thus destroying them.  Lighting some loose pamphlets to begin with,
he cut the volumes into pieces as well as he could, and with a
three-pronged fork shook them over the flames.  They kindled, and
lighted up the back of the house, the pigsty, and his own face, till
they were more or less consumed.

Though he was almost a stranger here now, passing cottagers talked to
him over the garden hedge.

"Burning up your awld aunt's rubbidge, I suppose?  Ay; a lot gets
heaped up in nooks and corners when you've lived eighty years in one
house."

It was nearly one o'clock in the morning before the leaves, covers,
and binding of Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, Newman
and the rest had gone to ashes, but the night was quiet, and as he
turned and turned the paper shreds with the fork, the sense of being
no longer a hypocrite to himself afforded his mind a relief which
gave him calm.  He might go on believing as before, but he professed
nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited engines of faith which,
as their proprietor, he might naturally be supposed to exercise on
himself first of all.  In his passion for Sue he could not stand as
an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited sepulchre.

Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had gone
along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back and
let him kiss her.  Jude ought not to have pretended that he was not a
lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act unconventionally,
if not wrongly.  She was inclined to call it the latter; for Sue's
logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed to maintain that
before a thing was done it might be right to do, but that being done
it became wrong; or, in other words, that things which were right in
theory were wrong in practice.

"I have been too weak, I think!" she jerked out as she pranced on,
shaking down tear-drops now and then.  "It was burning, like a
lover's--oh, it was!  And I won't write to him any more, or at least
for a long time, to impress him with my dignity!  And I hope it will
hurt him very much--expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the
next, and the next, and no letter coming.  He'll suffer then with
suspense--won't he, that's all!--and I am very glad of it!"--Tears
of pity for Jude's approaching sufferings at her hands mingled with
those which had surged up in pity for herself.

Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagreeable
to her, the ethereal, fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by
temperament and instinct to fulfil the conditions of the matrimonial
relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man, walked
fitfully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by
gazing and worrying hopelessly.

Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was
troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing effect of her
aunt's death and funeral.  He began telling her of his day's doings,
and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom he
had not seen for years, had called upon him.  While ascending to the
town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said suddenly
and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white road and
its bordering bushes of hazel:

"Richard--I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while.  I don't know
whether you think it wrong?"

He, waking apparently from thoughts of far different mould, said
vaguely, "Oh, did you?  What did you do that for?"

"I don't know.  He wanted to, and I let him."

"I hope it pleased him.  I should think it was hardly a novelty."

They lapsed into silence.  Had this been a case in the court of an
omniscient judge, he might have entered on his notes the curious fact
that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had not
said a word about the kiss.

After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school registers.
She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condition,
and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early.  When
Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the
attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o'clock.  Entering
their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or forty
miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex, he went
to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed with
hard-breathing fixity into the mysterious darkness which now covered
the far-reaching scene.  He was musing, "I think," he said at last,
without turning his head, "that I must get the committee to change
the school-stationer.  All the copybooks are sent wrong this time."

There was no reply.  Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:

"And there must be a rearrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room.  The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully and gives
me the ear-ache."

As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned round.
The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the walls
upstairs and down in the dilapidated "Old-Grove Place," and the
massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd contrast
to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of birch
furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to nod
to each other across three centuries upon the shaking floor.

"Soo!" he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her name).

She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there--the
clothes on her side being flung back.  Thinking she might have
forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to
see to it, he pulled off his coat and idled quietly enough for a
few minutes, when, finding she did not come, he went out upon the
landing, candle in hand, and said again "Soo!"

"Yes!" came back to him in her voice, from the distant kitchen
quarter.

"What are you doing down there at midnight--tiring yourself out for
nothing!"

"I am not sleepy; I am reading; and there is a larger fire here."

He went to bed.  Some time in the night he awoke.  She was not there,
even now.  Lighting a candle he hastily stepped out upon the landing,
and again called her name.

She answered "Yes!" as before, but the tones were small and confined,
and whence they came he could not at first understand.  Under the
staircase was a large clothes-closet, without a window; they seemed
to come from it.  The door was shut, but there was no lock or other
fastening.  Phillotson, alarmed, went towards it, wondering if she
had suddenly become deranged.

"What are you doing in there?" he asked.

"Not to disturb you I came here, as it was so late."

"But there's no bed, is there?  And no ventilation!  Why, you'll be
suffocated if you stay all night!"

"Oh no, I think not.  Don't trouble about me."

"But--"  Phillotson seized the knob and pulled at the door.  She had
fastened it inside with a piece of string, which broke at his pull.
There being no bedstead she had flung down some rugs and made a
little nest for herself in the very cramped quarters the closet
afforded.

When he looked in upon her she sprang out of her lair, great-eyed and
trembling.

"You ought not to have pulled open the door!" she cried excitedly.
"It is not becoming in you!  Oh, will you go away; please will you!"

She looked so pitiful and pleading in her white nightgown against the
shadowy lumber-hole that he was quite worried.  She continued to
beseech him not to disturb her.

He said: "I've been kind to you, and given you every liberty; and it
is monstrous that you should feel in this way!"

"Yes," said she, weeping.  "I know that!  It is wrong and wicked of
me, I suppose!  I am very sorry.  But it is not I altogether that am
to blame!"

"Who is then?  Am I?"

"No--I don't know!  The universe, I suppose--things in general,
because they are so horrid and cruel!"

"Well, it is no use talking like that.  Making a man's house so
unseemly at this time o' night!  Eliza will hear if we don't mind."
(He meant the servant.)  "Just think if either of the parsons in this
town was to see us now!  I hate such eccentricities, Sue.  There's no
order or regularity in your sentiments! ...  But I won't intrude on
you further; only I would advise you not to shut the door too tight,
or I shall find you stifled to-morrow."

On rising the next morning he immediately looked into the closet, but
Sue had already gone downstairs.  There was a little nest where she
had lain, and spiders' webs hung overhead.  "What must a woman's
aversion be when it is stronger than her fear of spiders!" he said
bitterly.

He found her sitting at the breakfast-table, and the meal began
almost in silence, the burghers walking past upon the pavement--or
rather roadway, pavements being scarce here--which was two or three
feet above the level of the parlour floor.  They nodded down to the
happy couple their morning greetings, as they went on.

"Richard," she said all at once; "would you mind my living away from
you?"

"Away from me?  Why, that's what you were doing when I married you.
What then was the meaning of marrying at all?"

"You wouldn't like me any the better for telling you."

"I don't object to know."

"Because I thought I could do nothing else.  You had got my promise a
long time before that, remember.  Then, as time went on, I regretted
I had promised you, and was trying to see an honourable way to break
it off.  But as I couldn't I became rather reckless and careless
about the conventions.  Then you know what scandals were spread, and
how I was turned out of the training school you had taken such time
and trouble to prepare me for and get me into; and this frightened
me and it seemed then that the one thing I could do would be to let
the engagement stand.  Of course I, of all people, ought not to have
cared what was said, for it was just what I fancied I never did care
for.  But I was a coward--as so many women are--and my theoretic
unconventionality broke down.  If that had not entered into the case
it would have been better to have hurt your feelings once for all
then, than to marry you and hurt them all my life after...  And you
were so generous in never giving credit for a moment to the rumour."

"I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its probability and
inquired of your cousin about it."

"Ah!" she said with pained surprise.

"I didn't doubt you."

"But you inquired!"

"I took his word."

Her eyes had filled.  "HE wouldn't have inquired!" she said.
"But you haven't answered me.  Will you let me go away?  I know how
irregular it is of me to ask it--"

"It is irregular."

"But I do ask it!  Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classified.  If people are at all
peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that
produce comfort in others! ...  Will you let me?"

"But we married--"

"What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances," she burst out,
"if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?"

"But you are committing a sin in not liking me."

"I DO like you!  But I didn't reflect it would be--that it would be
so much more than that...  For a man and woman to live on intimate
terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances,
however legal.  There--I've said it! ...  Will you let me, Richard?"

"You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"

"Why can't we agree to free each other?  We made the compact, and
surely we can cancel it--not legally of course; but we can morally,
especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen
to be looked after.  Then we might be friends, and meet without pain
to either.  Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity!  We shall both be
dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you
relieved me from constraint for a little while?  I daresay you think
me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd.  Well--why
should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn't hurt other
people?"

"But it does--it hurts ME!  And you vowed to love me."

"Yes--that's it!  I am in the wrong.  I always am!  It is as culpable
to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as
silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"

"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"

"Well, if you insisted, yes.  But I meant living with Jude."

"As his wife?"

"As I choose."

Phillotson writhed.

Sue continued: "She, or he, 'who lets the world, or his own portion
of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the apelike one of imitation.'  J. S. Mill's words,
those are.  I have been reading it up.  Why can't you act upon them?
I wish to, always."

"What do I care about J. S. Mill!" moaned he.  "I only want to lead
a quiet life!  Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never
once occurred to me before our marriage--that you were in love, and
are in love, with Jude Fawley!"

"You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun.  But do you
suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and
live with him?"

The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of
replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being
such a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_ as she, in her loss of
courage at the last moment, meant it to appear.  She was beginning to
be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her
other little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could
make.

They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue entering
the class-room, where he could see the back of her head through the
glass partition whenever he turned his eyes that way.  As he went on
giving and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched from
concentrated agitation of thought, till at length he tore a scrap
from a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:


   Your request prevents my attending to work at all.  I don't
   know what I am doing!  Was it seriously made?


He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little
boy to take to Sue.  The child toddled off into the class-room.
Phillotson saw his wife turn and take the note, and the bend of her
pretty head as she read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent
undue expression under fire of so many young eyes.  He could not see
her hands, but she changed her position, and soon the child returned,
bringing nothing in reply.  In a few minutes, however, one of Sue's
class appeared, with a little note similar to his own.  These words
only were pencilled therein:


   I am sincerely sorry to say that it was seriously made.


Phillotson looked more disturbed than before, and the meeting-place
of his brows twitched again.  In ten minutes he called up the child
he had just sent to her, and dispatched another missive:


   God knows I don't want to thwart you in any reasonable way.
   My whole thought is to make you comfortable and happy.  But
   I cannot agree to such a preposterous notion as your going
   to live with your lover.  You would lose everybody's respect
   and regard; and so should I!


After an interval a similar part was enacted in the class-room, and
an answer came:


   I know you mean my good.  But I don't want to be respectable!
   To produce "Human development in its richest diversity" (to
   quote your Humboldt) is to my mind far above respectability.
   No doubt my tastes are low--in your view--hopelessly low!
   If you won t let me go to him, will you grant me this one
   request--allow me to live in your house in a separate way?


To this he returned no answer.

She wrote again:


   I know what you think.  But cannot you have pity on me?  I beg
   you to; I implore you to be merciful!  I would not ask if I
   were not almost compelled by what I can't bear!  No poor woman
   has ever wished more than I that Eve had not fallen, so that
   (as the primitive Christians believed) some harmless mode of
   vegetation might have peopled Paradise.  But I won't trifle!
   Be kind to me--even though I have not been kind to you!  I
   will go away, go abroad, anywhere, and never trouble you.


Nearly an hour passed, and then he returned an answer:


   I do not wish to pain you.  How well you KNOW I don't! Give me
   a little time.  I am disposed to agree to your last request.


One line from her:


   Thank you from my heart, Richard.  I do not deserve your
   kindness.


All day Phillotson bent a dazed regard upon her through the glazed
partition; and he felt as lonely as when he had not known her.

But he was as good as his word, and consented to her living apart
in the house.  At first, when they met at meals, she had seemed
more composed under the new arrangement; but the irksomeness of
their position worked on her temperament, and the fibres of her
nature seemed strained like harp-strings.  She talked vaguely and
indiscriminately to prevent his talking pertinently.




Phillotson was sitting up late, as was often his custom, trying to
get together the materials for his long-neglected hobby of Roman
antiquities.  For the first time since reviving the subject he felt a
return of his old interest in it.  He forgot time and place, and when
he remembered himself and ascended to rest it was nearly two o'clock.

His preoccupation was such that, though he now slept on the other
side of the house, he mechanically went to the room that he and his
wife had occupied when he first became a tenant of Old-Grove Place,
which since his differences with Sue had been hers exclusively.
He entered, and unconsciously began to undress.

There was a cry from the bed, and a quick movement.  Before the
schoolmaster had realized where he was he perceived Sue starting up
half-awake, staring wildly, and springing out upon the floor on the
side away from him, which was towards the window.  This was somewhat
hidden by the canopy of the bedstead, and in a moment he heard her
flinging up the sash.  Before he had thought that she meant to do
more than get air she had mounted upon the sill and leapt out.  She
disappeared in the darkness, and he heard her fall below.

Phillotson, horrified, ran downstairs, striking himself sharply
against the newel in his haste.  Opening the heavy door he ascended
the two or three steps to the level of the ground, and there on the
gravel before him lay a white heap.  Phillotson seized it in his
arms, and bringing Sue into the hall seated her on a chair, where he
gazed at her by the flapping light of the candle which he had set
down in the draught on the bottom stair.

She had certainly not broken her neck.  She looked at him with eyes
that seemed not to take him in; and though not particularly large in
general they appeared so now.  She pressed her side and rubbed her
arm, as if conscious of pain; then stood up, averting her face, in
evident distress at his gaze.

"Thank God--you are not killed!  Though it's not for want of
trying--not much hurt I hope?"

Her fall, in fact, had not been a serious one, probably owing to the
lowness of the old rooms and to the high level of the ground without.
Beyond a scraped elbow and a blow in the side she had apparently
incurred little harm.

"I was asleep, I think!" she began, her pale face still turned away
from him.  "And something frightened me--a terrible dream--I thought
I saw you--"  The actual circumstances seemed to come back to her,
and she was silent.

Her cloak was hanging at the back of the door, and the wretched
Phillotson flung it round her.  "Shall I help you upstairs?" he asked
drearily; for the significance of all this sickened him of himself
and of everything.

"No thank you, Richard.  I am very little hurt.  I can walk."

"You ought to lock your door," he mechanically said, as if lecturing
in school.  "Then no one could intrude even by accident."

"I have tried--it won't lock.  All the doors are out of order."

The aspect of things was not improved by her admission.  She ascended
the staircase slowly, the waving light of the candle shining on her.
Phillotson did not approach her, or attempt to ascend himself till he
heard her enter her room.  Then he fastened up the front door, and
returning, sat down on the lower stairs, holding the newel with one
hand, and bowing his face into the other.  Thus he remained for a
long long time--a pitiable object enough to one who had seen him;
till, raising his head and sighing a sigh which seemed to say that
the business of his life must be carried on, whether he had a wife or
no, he took the candle and went upstairs to his lonely room on the
other side of the landing.

No further incident touching the matter between them occurred till
the following evening, when, immediately school was over, Phillotson
walked out of Shaston, saying he required no tea, and not informing
Sue where he was going.  He descended from the town level by a steep
road in a north-westerly direction, and continued to move downwards
till the soil changed from its white dryness to a tough brown clay.
He was now on the low alluvial beds


   Where Duncliffe is the traveller's mark,
   And cloty Stour's a-rolling dark.


More than once he looked back in the increasing obscurity of evening.
Against the sky was Shaston, dimly visible


   On the grey-topp'd height
   Of Paladore, as pale day wore
   Away... [William Barnes.]


The new-lit lights from its windows burnt with a steady shine as if
watching him, one of which windows was his own.  Above it he could
just discern the pinnacled tower of Trinity Church.  The air down
here, tempered by the thick damp bed of tenacious clay, was not as it
had been above, but soft and relaxing, so that when he had walked a
mile or two he was obliged to wipe his face with his handkerchief.

Leaving Duncliffe Hill on the left he proceeded without hesitation
through the shade, as a man goes on, night or day, in a district over
which he has played as a boy.  He had walked altogether about four
and a half miles


   Where Stour receives her strength,
   From six cleere fountains fed, [Drayton.]


when he crossed a tributary of the Stour, and reached Leddenton--a
little town of three or four thousand inhabitants--where he went
on to the boys' school, and knocked at the door of the master's
residence.

A boy pupil-teacher opened it, and to Phillotson's inquiry if Mr.
Gillingham was at home, replied that he was, going at once off to his
own house, and leaving Phillotson to find his way in as he could.  He
discovered his friend putting away some books from which he had been
giving evening lessons.  The light of the paraffin lamp fell on
Phillotson's face--pale and wretched by contrast with his friend's,
who had a cool, practical look.  They had been schoolmates in
boyhood, and fellow-students at Wintoncester Training College, many
years before this time.

"Glad to see you, Dick!  But you don't look well!  Nothing the
matter?"

Phillotson advanced without replying, and Gillingham closed the
cupboard and pulled up beside his visitor.

"Why you haven't been here--let me see--since you were married?
I called, you know, but you were out; and upon my word it is such a
climb after dark that I have been waiting till the days are longer
before lumpering up again.  I am glad you didn't wait, however."

Though well-trained and even proficient masters, they occasionally
used a dialect-word of their boyhood to each other in private.

"I've come, George, to explain to you my reasons for taking a step
that I am about to take, so that you, at least, will understand my
motives if other people question them anywhen--as they may, indeed
certainly will...  But anything is better than the present condition
of things.  God forbid that you should ever have such an experience
as mine!"

"Sit down.  You don't mean--anything wrong between you and Mrs.
Phillotson?"

"I do...  My wretched state is that I've a wife I love who not
only does not love me, but--but--  Well, I won't say.  I know her
feeling!  I should prefer hatred from her!"

"Ssh!"

"And the sad part of it is that she is not so much to blame as I. She
was a pupil-teacher under me, as you know, and I took advantage of
her inexperience, and toled her out for walks, and got her to agree
to a long engagement before she well knew her own mind.  Afterwards
she saw somebody else, but she blindly fulfilled her engagement."

"Loving the other?"

"Yes; with a curious tender solicitude seemingly; though her exact
feeling for him is a riddle to me--and to him too, I think--possibly
to herself.  She is one of the oddest creatures I ever met.  However,
I have been struck with these two facts; the extraordinary sympathy,
or similarity, between the pair.  He is her cousin, which perhaps
accounts for some of it.  They seem to be one person split in two!
And with her unconquerable aversion to myself as a husband, even
though she may like me as a friend, 'tis too much to bear longer.
She has conscientiously struggled against it, but to no purpose.
I cannot bear it--I cannot!  I can't answer her arguments--she has
read ten times as much as I.  Her intellect sparkles like diamonds,
while mine smoulders like brown paper...  She's one too many for me!"

"She'll get over it, good-now?"

"Never!  It is--but I won't go into it--there are reasons why she
never will.  At last she calmly and firmly asked if she might leave
me and go to him.  The climax came last night, when, owing to my
entering her room by accident, she jumped out of window--so strong
was her dread of me!  She pretended it was a dream, but that was
to soothe me.  Now when a woman jumps out of window without caring
whether she breaks her neck or no, she's not to be mistaken; and this
being the case I have come to a conclusion: that it is wrong to so
torture a fellow-creature any longer; and I won't be the inhuman
wretch to do it, cost what it may!"

"What--you'll let her go?  And with her lover?"

"Whom with is her matter.  I shall let her go; with him certainly,
if she wishes.  I know I may be wrong--I know I can't logically,
or religiously, defend my concession to such a wish of hers, or
harmonize it with the doctrines I was brought up in.  Only I know one
thing: something within me tells me I am doing wrong in refusing
her.  I, like other men, profess to hold that if a husband gets such
a so-called preposterous request from his wife, the only course that
can possibly be regarded as right and proper and honourable in him is
to refuse it, and put her virtuously under lock and key, and murder
her lover perhaps.  But is that essentially right, and proper, and
honourable, or is it contemptibly mean and selfish?  I don't profess
to decide.  I simply am going to act by instinct, and let principles
take care of themselves.  If a person who has blindly walked into a
quagmire cries for help, I am inclined to give it, if possible."

"But--you see, there's the question of neighbours and society--what
will happen if everybody--"

"Oh, I am not going to be a philosopher any longer!  I only see
what's under my eyes."

"Well--I don't agree with your instinct, Dick!" said Gillingham
gravely.  "I am quite amazed, to tell the truth, that such a sedate,
plodding fellow as you should have entertained such a craze for a
moment.  You said when I called that she was puzzling and peculiar:
I think you are!"

"Have you ever stood before a woman whom you know to be intrinsically
a good woman, while she has pleaded for release--been the man she has
knelt to and implored indulgence of?"

"I am thankful to say I haven't."

"Then I don't think you are in a position to give an opinion.  I
have been that man, and it makes all the difference in the world, if
one has any manliness or chivalry in him.  I had not the remotest
idea--living apart from women as I have done for so many years--that
merely taking a woman to church and putting a ring upon her finger
could by any possibility involve one in such a daily, continuous
tragedy as that now shared by her and me!"

"Well, I could admit some excuse for letting her leave you, provided
she kept to herself.  But to go attended by a cavalier--that makes a
difference."

"Not a bit.  Suppose, as I believe, she would rather endure her
present misery than be made to promise to keep apart from him?
All that is a question for herself.  It is not the same thing at
all as the treachery of living on with a husband and playing him
false...  However, she has not distinctly implied living with him
as wife, though I think she means to...  And, to the best of my
understanding, it is not an ignoble, merely animal, feeling between
the two: that is the worst of it; because it makes me think their
affection will be enduring.  I did not mean to confess to you that in
the first jealous weeks of my marriage, before I had come to my right
mind, I hid myself in the school one evening when they were together
there, and I heard what they said.  I am ashamed of it now, though
I suppose I was only exercising a legal right.  I found from their
manner that an extraordinary affinity, or sympathy, entered into
their attachment, which somehow took away all flavour of grossness.
Their supreme desire is to be together--to share each other's
emotions, and fancies, and dreams."

"Platonic!"

"Well no.  Shelleyan would be nearer to it.  They remind me of--what
are their names--Laon and Cythna.  Also of Paul and Virginia a
little.  The more I reflect, the more ENTIRELY I am on their side!"

"But if people did as you want to do, there'd be a general domestic
disintegration.  The family would no longer be the social unit."

"Yes--I am all abroad, I suppose!" said Phillotson sadly.  "I was
never a very bright reasoner, you remember....  And yet, I don't see
why the woman and the children should not be the unit without the
man."

"By the Lord Harry!--Matriarchy! ...  Does SHE say all this too?"

"Oh no.  She little thinks I have out-Sued Sue in this--all in the
last twelve hours!"

"It will upset all received opinion hereabout.  Good God--what will
Shaston say!"

"I don't say that it won't.  I don't know--I don't know! ...  As I
say, I am only a feeler, not a reasoner."

"Now," said Gillingham, "let us take it quietly, and have something
to drink over it."  He went under the stairs, and produced a bottle
of cider-wine, of which they drank a rummer each.  "I think you are
rafted, and not yourself," he continued.  "Do go back and make up
your mind to put up with a few whims.  But keep her.  I hear on all
sides that she's a charming young thing."

"Ah yes!  That's the bitterness of it!  Well, I won't stay.  I have a
long walk before me."

Gillingham accompanied his friend a mile on his way, and at parting
expressed his hope that this consultation, singular as its subject
was, would be the renewal of their old comradeship.  "Stick to her!"
were his last words, flung into the darkness after Phillotson; from
which his friend answered "Aye, aye!"

But when Phillotson was alone under the clouds of night, and no
sound was audible but that of the purling tributaries of the Stour,
he said, "So Gillingham, my friend, you had no stronger arguments
against it than those!"

"I think she ought to be smacked, and brought to her senses--that's
what I think!" murmured Gillingham, as he walked back alone.

The next morning came, and at breakfast Phillotson told Sue:

"You may go--with whom you will.  I absolutely and unconditionally
agree."

Having once come to this conclusion it seemed to Phillotson more
and more indubitably the true one.  His mild serenity at the sense
that he was doing his duty by a woman who was at his mercy almost
overpowered his grief at relinquishing her.

Some days passed, and the evening of their last meal together had
come--a cloudy evening with wind--which indeed was very seldom absent
in this elevated place.  How permanently it was imprinted upon his
vision; that look of her as she glided into the parlour to tea;
a slim flexible figure; a face, strained from its roundness, and
marked by the pallors of restless days and nights, suggesting tragic
possibilities quite at variance with her times of buoyancy; a trying
of this morsel and that, and an inability to eat either.  Her nervous
manner, begotten of a fear lest he should be injured by her course,
might have been interpreted by a stranger as displeasure that
Phillotson intruded his presence on her for the few brief minutes
that remained.

"You had better have a slice of ham or an egg, or something with your
tea?  You can't travel on a mouthful of bread and butter."

She took the slice he helped her to; and they discussed as they sat
trivial questions of housekeeping, such as where he would find the
key of this or that cupboard, what little bills were paid, and what
not.

"I am a bachelor by nature, as you know, Sue," he said, in a heroic
attempt to put her at her ease.  "So that being without a wife will
not really be irksome to me, as it might be to other men who have
had one a little while.  I have, too, this grand hobby in my head of
writing 'The Roman Antiquities of Wessex,' which will occupy all my
spare hours."

"If you will send me some of the manuscript to copy at any time,
as you used to, I will do it with so much pleasure!" she said with
amenable gentleness.  "I should much like to be some help to you
still--as a--f-f-friend."

Phillotson mused, and said: "No, I think we ought to be really
separate, if we are to be at all.  And for this reason, that I don't
wish to ask you any questions, and particularly wish you not to give
me information as to your movements, or even your address...  Now,
what money do you want?  You must have some, you know."

"Oh, of course, Richard, I couldn't think of having any of your money
to go away from you with!  I don't want any either.  I have enough of
my own to last me for a long while, and Jude will let me have--"

"I would rather not know anything about him, if you don't mind.
You are free, absolutely; and your course is your own."

"Very well.  But I'll just say that I have packed only a change or
two of my own personal clothing, and one or two little things besides
that are my very own.  I wish you would look into my trunk before it
is closed.  Besides that I have only a small parcel that will go into
Jude's portmanteau."

"Of course I shall do no such thing as examine your luggage!  I wish
you would take three-quarters of the household furniture.  I don't
want to be bothered with it.  I have a sort of affection for a little
of it that belonged to my poor mother and father.  But the rest you
are welcome to whenever you like to send for it."

"That I shall never do."

"You go by the six-thirty train, don't you?  It is now a quarter to
six."

"You...  You don't seem very sorry I am going, Richard!"

"Oh no--perhaps not."

"I like you much for how you have behaved.  It is a curious thing
that directly I have begun to regard you as not my husband, but as
my old teacher, I like you.  I won't be so affected as to say I love
you, because you know I don't, except as a friend.  But you do seem
that to me!"

Sue was for a few moments a little tearful at these reflections, and
then the station omnibus came round to take her up.  Phillotson saw
her things put on the top, handed her in, and was obliged to make an
appearance of kissing her as he wished her good-bye, which she quite
understood and imitated.  From the cheerful manner in which they
parted the omnibus-man had no other idea than that she was going for
a short visit.

When Phillotson got back into the house he went upstairs and opened
the window in the direction the omnibus had taken.  Soon the noise of
its wheels died away.  He came down then, his face compressed like
that of one bearing pain; he put on his hat and went out, following
by the same route for nearly a mile.  Suddenly turning round he came
home.

He had no sooner entered than the voice of his friend Gillingham
greeted him from the front room.

"I could make nobody hear; so finding your door open I walked in, and
made myself comfortable.  I said I would call, you remember."

"Yes.  I am much obliged to you, Gillingham, particularly for coming
to-night."

"How is Mrs.--"

"She is quite well.  She is gone--just gone.  That's her tea-cup,
that she drank out of only an hour ago.  And that's the plate
she--"  Phillotson's throat got choked up, and he could not go on.
He turned and pushed the tea-things aside.

"Have you had any tea, by the by?" he asked presently in a renewed
voice.

"No--yes--never mind," said Gillingham, preoccupied.  "Gone, you say
she is?"

"Yes...  I would have died for her; but I wouldn't be cruel to her
in the name of the law.  She is, as I understand, gone to join her
lover.  What they are going to do I cannot say.  Whatever it may be
she has my full consent to."

There was a stability, a ballast, in Phillotson's pronouncement which
restrained his friend's comment.  "Shall I--leave you?" he asked.

"No, no.  It is a mercy to me that you have come.  I have some
articles to arrange and clear away.  Would you help me?"

Gillingham assented; and having gone to the upper rooms the
schoolmaster opened drawers, and began taking out all Sue's things
that she had left behind, and laying them in a large box.  "She
wouldn't take all I wanted her to," he continued.  "But when I made
up my mind to her going to live in her own way I did make up my
mind."

"Some men would have stopped at an agreement to separate."

"I've gone into all that, and don't wish to argue it.  I was, and
am, the most old-fashioned man in the world on the question of
marriage--in fact I had never thought critically about its ethics
at all.  But certain facts stared me in the face, and I couldn't go
against them."

They went on with the packing silently.  When it was done Phillotson
closed the box and turned the key.

"There," he said.  "To adorn her in somebody's eyes; never again in
mine!"

 When Sue leaves, she and Jude kiss passionately; reflecting on it, Jude sees it as a sign of his alienation from the ministry, an indication of his being unfit to profess the conventional beliefs. He thinks of the fact that Arabella hindered his aspirations to knowledge and now Sue has interfered with his desire to enter the church. He therefore burns all his theological works, so as not to leave himself in a hypocritical position. Sue berates herself for being weak but when she sees Phillotson again she tells him of Jude's holding her hand, not his kissing her. That night she sleeps apart from her husband and the next day asks if she can live away from him. She tells him that she married him because she could not think of anything else to do and was frightened by the scandal at the training college. She argues that "domestic laws should be made according to temperaments," when Phillotson says her request is irregular. When he asks what she means by living away from him, she says she meant living with Jude, not necessarily as his wife, but in any way she chooses. In a series of notes exchanged between their classrooms as they teach, Phillotson agrees only to letting her live apart from him in the house. When one night Phillotson mistakenly enters Sue's room, she leaps out of the window and slightly injures herself, later explaining to her husband that her action was caused by a dream, an explanation he doesn't believe. Phillotson goes to see his teacher friend Gillingham, in a nearby town, to have someone to talk to. Admitting that Jude and Sue "seem to be one person split in two," he tells his friend that he has decided to let Sue go, her jumping out the window being the final sign of her unwillingness to stay with him. Against Gillingham's arguments, Phillotson can only say that his instinct tells him to set Sue free, though it is opposed to all he believes in. He tells Sue of his decision, and on the day she is to leave they discuss only practical matters. After Sue leaves, Gillingham comes to call.

