Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Shaston
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sense of being no longer a hypocrite to himself a
fforded his mind a
relief which gave him calm. He might go on believing as before,
but he professed nothing, and no longer owned and exhibited
engines of faith which, as their proprietor, he might naturally be
supposed to exercise on himself 
first of all. In his passion for Sue
he could now stand as an ordinary sinner, and not as a whited
sepulchre.
Meanwhile Sue, after parting from him earlier in the day, had
gone along to the station, with tears in her eyes for having run back
and let him kiss her. Jude ought not to have pretended that he was
not a lover, and made her give way to an impulse to act
unconventionally, if not wrongly. She was inclined to call it the
latter; for Sue’s logic was extraordinarily compounded, and seemed
to maintain that before a thing was done it might be right to do, but
that being done it became wrong; or, in other words, that things
which were right in theory were wrong in practice.
‘I have been too weak, I think!’ she jerked out as she pranced on,
shaking down tear-drops now and then. ‘It was burning, like a
lover’s––O it was! And I won’t write to him any more, or at least for a
long time, to impress him with my dignity! And I hope it will hurt
him very much––expecting a letter to-morrow morning, and the
next, and the next, and no letter coming. He’ll su
ffer then with
suspense––won’t he, that’s all!––and I am very glad of it!’––Tears of
pity for Jude’s approaching su
fferings at her hands mingled with
those which had surged up in pity for herself.
Then the slim little wife of a husband whose person was disagree-
able to her, the ethereal, 
fine-nerved, sensitive girl, quite unfitted by
temperament and instinct to ful
fil the conditions of the matrimonial
relation with Phillotson, possibly with scarce any man,* walked 
fit-
fully along, and panted, and brought weariness into her eyes by
gazing and worrying hopelessly.
Phillotson met her at the arrival station, and, seeing that she was
troubled, thought it must be owing to the depressing e
ffect of her
aunt’s death and funeral. He began telling her of his day’s doings,
and how his friend Gillingham, a neighbouring schoolmaster whom
he had not seen for years, had called upon him. While ascending to
the town, seated on the top of the omnibus beside him, she said
suddenly and with an air of self-chastisement, regarding the white
road and its bordering bushes of hazel:
Jude the Obscure
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‘Richard––I let Mr. Fawley hold my hand a long while. I don’t
know whether you think it wrong?’
He, waking apparently from thoughts of far di
fferent mould, said
vaguely, ‘O, did you? What did you do that for?’
‘I don’t know. He wanted to, and I let him.’
‘I hope it pleased him. I should think it was hardly a novelty.’
They lapsed into silence. Had this been a case in the court of an
omniscient judge he might have entered on his notes the curious fact
that Sue had placed the minor for the major indiscretion, and had
not said a word about the kiss.
After tea that evening Phillotson sat balancing the school regis-
ters. She remained in an unusually silent, tense, and restless condi-
tion, and at last, saying she was tired, went to bed early. When
Phillotson arrived upstairs, weary with the drudgery of the
attendance-numbers, it was a quarter to twelve o’clock. Entering
their chamber, which by day commanded a view of some thirty or
forty miles over the Vale of Blackmoor, and even into Outer Wessex,
he went to the window, and, pressing his face against the pane, gazed
with hard-breathing 
fixity into the mysterious darkness which now
covered the far-reaching scene. He was musing. ‘I think,’ he said at
last, without turning his head, ‘that I must get the Committee to
change the school-stationer. All the copybooks are sent wrong this
time.’
There was no reply. Thinking Sue was dozing he went on:
‘And there must be a re-arrangement of that ventilator in the
class-room. The wind blows down upon my head unmercifully, and
gives me the earache.’
As the silence seemed more absolute than ordinarily he turned
round. The heavy, gloomy oak wainscot, which extended over the
walls upstairs and down in the dilapidated ‘Old-Grove House,’ and
the massive chimney-piece reaching to the ceiling, stood in odd con-
trast to the new and shining brass bedstead, and the new suite of
birch furniture that he had bought for her, the two styles seeming to
nod to each other across three centuries upon the shaking 
floor.
‘Soo!’ he said (this being the way in which he pronounced her
name).
She was not in the bed, though she had apparently been there––
the clothes on her side being 
flung back. Thinking she might have
forgotten some kitchen detail and gone downstairs for a moment to