"O yes," she said. "He is obliged to be in the school all the day,
or he would have come with me. He is so good and kind that to
accompany me he would have dismissed the school for once, even
against his principles--for he is strongly opposed to giving casual
holidays--only I wouldn't let him. I felt it would be better to come
alone. Aunt Drusilla, I knew, was so very eccentric; and his being
almost a stranger to her now would have made it irksome to both.
Since it turns out that she is hardly conscious I am glad I did not
ask him."
Jude had walked moodily while this praise of Phillotson was being
expressed. "Mr. Phillotson obliges you in everything, as he ought,"
he said.
"Of course."
"You ought to be a happy wife."
"And of course I am."
"Bride, I might almost have said, as yet. It is not so many weeks
since I gave you to him, and--"
"Yes, I know! I know!" There was something in her face which belied
her late assuring words, so strictly proper and so lifelessly spoken
that they might have been taken from a list of model speeches in "The
Wife's Guide to Conduct." Jude knew the quality of every vibration
in Sue's voice, could read every symptom of her mental condition; and
he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a
month married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last
of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing;
for Sue naturally did such things as those.
"Well, you have my good wishes now as always, Mrs. Phillotson."
She reproached him by a glance.
"No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson," murmured Jude. "You are dear,
free Sue Bridehead, only you don't know it! Wifedom has not yet
squashed up and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no
further individuality."
Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, "Nor has
husbandom you, so far as I can see!"
"But it has!" he said, shaking his head sadly.
When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the
Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and
quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there
now. He could not help saying to Sue: "That's the house my wife and
I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her
home to that house."