Jude the Obsure

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.