"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.