Jude the Obsure

"I feel the same!"

"What shall we do? You are in work now; but remember, it may

only be because our history and relations are not absolutely

known... Possibly, if they knew our marriage had not been formalized they

would turn you out of your job as they did at Aldbrickham!"

"I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think

that we ought to make it legal now--as soon as you are able to go

out."

"You think we ought?"

"Certainly."

And Jude fell into thought. "I have seemed to myself lately,"

he said, "to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the

virtuous--the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it!

I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you,

whom I love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder

if any other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as

I? ... Yes, Sue--that's what I am. I seduced you... You were a

distinct type--a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left

intact. But I couldn't leave you alone!"

"No, no, Jude!" she said quickly. "Don't reproach yourself with

being what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I."

"I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me

perhaps you wouldn't have urged him to let you go."

"I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not

having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our

union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity

of our first marriages."

"Solemnity?" Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew

conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.

"Yes," she said, with a little quiver in her words, "I have had

dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action.

I have thought--that I am still his wife!"

"Whose?"

"Richard's."

"Good God, dearest!--why?"

"Oh I can't explain! Only the thought comes to me."

"It is your weakness--a sick fancy, without reason or meaning!

Don't let it trouble you."

Sue sighed uneasily.

As a set-off against such discussions as these there had come

an improvement in their pecuniary position, which earlier in

their experience would have made them cheerful. Jude had quite

unexpectedly found good employment at his old trade almost directly

he arrived, the summer weather suiting his fragile constitution; and

outwardly his days went on with that monotonous uniformity which

is in itself so grateful after vicissitude. People seemed to have

forgotten that he had ever shown any awkward aberrancies: and he

daily mounted to the parapets and copings of colleges he could never

enter, and renewed the crumbling freestones of mullioned windows he

would never look from, as if he had known no wish to do otherwise.