Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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in him for buying her frocks and hats when he should begin to get
frightened a bit, and stick to his trade, and throw aside those stupid
books for practical undertakings.
So to the cottage he took her on the evening of the marriage,
giving up his old room at his aunt’s––where so much of the hard
labour at Greek and Latin had been carried on. A little chill over-
spread him at her 
first unrobing. A long tail of hair, which Arabella
wore twisted up in an enormous knob at the back of her head, was
deliberately unfastened, stroked out, and hung upon the looking
glass which he had bought her.
‘What––it wasn’t your own?’ he said, with a sudden distaste for
her.
‘O no––it never is nowadays with the better class.’
‘Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed
to be di
fferent. Besides, you’ve enough of your own, surely?’
‘Yes, enough as country notions go. But in towns the men expect
more, and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham——’
‘Barmaid at Aldbrickham?’
‘Well, not exactly barmaid––I used to draw the drink at a public-
house there––just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me
up to getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have
the better in Aldbrickham, which is a 
finer town than all your
Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair––the barber’s
assistant told me so.’
Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be
true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls
would and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing
their simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an
instinct towards arti
ficiality in their very blood, and became adepts
in counterfeiting at the 
first glimpse of it. However perhaps there
was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to
think no more of it.
A new-made wife can usually manage to excite interest for a few
weeks, even though the prospects of the household ways and means
are cloudy. There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her
manner to her acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries o
ff the
gloom of facts, and renders even the humblest bride independent
awhile of the real. Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of
Alfredston one market-day with this quality in her carriage when she
At Marygreen
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met Anny her former friend, whom she had not seen since the
wedding.
As usual they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to
them without saying it.
‘So it turned out a good plan you see!’ remarked the girl to the
wife. ‘I knew it would with such as him. He’s a dear good fellow, and
you ought to be proud of un.’
‘I am,’ said Mrs. Fawley quietly.
‘And when do you expect——?’
‘Ssh! Not at all.’
‘What!’
‘I was mistaken.’
‘O Arabella, Arabella; you be a deep one! Mistaken! well, that’s
clever––it’s a real stroke of genius! It is a thing I never thought o’,
wi’ all my experience! I never thought beyond bringing about the
real thing––not that one could sham it!’
‘Don’t you be too quick to cry sham! ’Twasn’t sham. I didn’t
know.’
‘My word––won’t he be in a taking! He’ll give it to ’ee o’ Saturday
nights! Whatever it was, he’ll say it was a trick––a double one, by the
Lord!’
‘I’ll own to the 
first, but not to the second. . . . Pooh––he won’t
care! He’ll be glad I was wrong in what I said. He’ll shake down,
bless ’ee––men always do. What can ’em do otherwise? Married is
married.’
Nevertheless it was with a little uneasiness that Arabella
approached the time when in the natural course of things she would
have to reveal that the alarm she had raised had been without foun-
dation. The occasion was one evening at bedtime, and they were in
their chamber in the lonely cottage by the wayside, to which Jude
walked home from his work every day. He had worked hard the
whole twelve hours, and had retired to rest before his wife. When she
came into the room he was between sleeping and waking, and was
barely conscious of her undressing before the little looking-glass as
he lay.
One action of hers, however, brought him to full cognition. Her
face being re
flected towards him as she sat, he could perceive that
she was amusing herself by arti
ficially producing in each cheek the
dimple before alluded to, a curious accomplishment of which she
Jude the Obscure
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was mistress, e
ffecting it by a momentary suction. It seemed to him
for the 
first time that the dimples were far oftener absent from her
face during his intercourse with her nowadays than they had been in
the earlier weeks of their acquaintance.
‘Don’t do that, Arabella!’ he said suddenly. ‘There is no harm in
it, but––I don’t like to see you.’
She turned and laughed. ‘Lord, I didn’t know you were awake!’
she said. ‘How countri
fied you are! That’s nothing.’
‘Where did you learn it?’
‘Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble
when I was at the public-house; but now they won’t. My face was
fatter then.’
‘I don’t care about dimples. I don’t think they improve a woman––