Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

At Shaston
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once for all then, than to marry you and hurt them all my life
after. . . . And you were so generous in never giving credit for a
moment to the rumour.’
‘I am bound in honesty to tell you that I weighed its probability,
and inquired of your cousin about it.’
‘Ah!’ she said with pained surprise.
‘I didn’t doubt you.’
‘But you inquired!’
‘I took his word.’
Her eyes had 
filled. ‘He wouldn’t have inquired!’ she said. ‘But
you haven’t answered me. Will you let me go away? I know how
irregular it is of me to ask it——’
‘It is irregular.’
‘But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classi
fied. If people are at all pecu-
liar in character they have to su
ffer from the very rules that produce
comfort in others! . . . Will you let me?’
‘But we married——’
‘What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances,’ she burst out,
‘if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no
sin?’*
‘But you are committing a sin in not liking me.’
‘I do like you! But I didn’t re
flect it would be––that it would be so
much more than that. . . . For a man and woman to live on intimate
terms when one feels as I do is adultery,* in any circumstances,
however legal. There––I’ve said it! . . . Will you let me, Richard?’
‘You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!’
‘Why can’t we agree to free each other? We made the compact,
and surely we can cancel it––not legally, of course; but we can mor-
ally, especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have
arisen to be looked after. Then we might be friends, and meet with-
out pain to either. O Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall
both be dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody
that you relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you
think me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd. Well––
why should I su
ffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn’t hurt other
people?’
‘But it does––it hurts me. And you vowed to love me.’
‘Yes––that’s it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable to
Jude the Obscure
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bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as silly
as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!’
‘And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself ?’
‘Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude.’
‘As his wife?’
‘As I choose.’
Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: ‘She, or he, “who lets the world, or his own por-
tion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” J. S. Mill’s words,* those
are. I have been reading it up. Why can’t you act upon them? I wish
to, always.’
‘What do I care about J. S. Mill!’ moaned he. ‘I only want to lead a
quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never
once occurred to me before our marriage––that you were in love, and
are in love, with Jude Fawley.’
‘You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun. But do
you suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go
and live with him?’
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity
of replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being
such a convincing argumentum ad verecundiam* as she, in her loss of
courage at the last moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to
be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her
other little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could
make.
They proceeded to the schools that morning as usual, Sue enter-
ing the class-room, where he could see the back of her head through
the glass partition whenever he turned his eyes that way. As he went
on giving and hearing lessons his forehead and eyebrows twitched
from concentrated agitation of thought; till at length he tore a scrap
from a sheet of scribbling paper and wrote:
‘Your request prevents my attending to work at all. I don’t know what I
am doing! Was it seriously made?’
He folded the piece of paper very small, and gave it to a little boy
to take to Sue. The child toddled o
ff into the class-room. Phillotson
saw his wife turn and take the note, and the bend of her pretty head
as she read it, her lips slightly crisped, to prevent undue expression