"I can mind the man very well. A very civil, honourable liver; but
Lord!--I don't want to wownd your feelings, but--there be certain men
here and there that no woman of any niceness can stomach. I should
have said he was one. I don't say so NOW, since you must ha' known
better than I--but that's what I SHOULD have said!"
Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the
outhouse, crying.
"Don't cry, dear!" said Jude in distress. "She means well, but is
very crusty and queer now, you know."
"Oh no--it isn't that!" said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. "I don't
mind her roughness one bit."
"What is it, then?"
"It is that what she says is--is true!"
"God--what--you don't like him?" asked Jude.
"I don't mean that!" she said hastily. "That I ought--perhaps I
ought not to have married!"
He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first.
They went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took
rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly
married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her.
In the afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbour to
drive her to Alfredston.
"I'll go with you to the station, if you'd like?" he said.
She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude
helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she
looked at him prohibitively.
"I suppose--I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at
Melchester?" he half-crossly observed.
She bent down and said softly: "No, dear--you are not to come yet.
I don't think you are in a good mood."
"Very well," said Jude. "Good-bye!"
"Good-bye!" She waved her hand and was gone.
"She's right! I won't go!" he murmured.
He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every
possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in
attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love
her. He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church
history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century. Before
he had returned from Marygreen to Melchester there arrived a letter
from Arabella. The sight of it revived a stronger feeling of
self-condemnation for his brief return to her society than for his
attachment to Sue.