Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

Jude the Obscure
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living, and the mixed character of her fellow-students, gathered
together from all parts of the diocese, and how she had to get up and
work by gas-light in the early morning, with all the bitterness of a
young person to whom restraint was new. To all this he listened; but
it was not what he wanted especially to know––her relations with
Phillotson. That was what she did not tell. When they had sat and
eaten, Jude impulsively placed his hand upon hers; she looked up
and smiled, and took his quite freely into her own little soft one,
dividing his 
fingers and coolly examining them, as if they were the
fingers of a glove she was purchasing.
‘Your hands are rather rough, Jude, aren’t they?’ she said.
‘Yes. So would yours be if they held a mallet and chisel all day.’
‘I don’t dislike it, you know. I think it is noble to see a man’s hands
subdued to what he works in. . . .* Well, I’m rather glad I came to this
Training-School, after all. See how independent I shall be after
the two years’ training! I shall pass pretty high, I expect, and Mr.
Phillotson will use his in
fluence to get me a big school.’
She had touched the subject at last. ‘I had a suspicion, a fear,’ said
Jude, ‘that he––cared about you rather warmly, and perhaps wanted
to marry you.’
‘Now don’t be such a silly boy!’
‘He has said something about it, I expect.’
‘If he had, what would it matter? An old man like him.’
‘O, come, Sue; he’s not so very old. And I know what I saw him
doing——’
‘Not kissing me––that I’m certain!’
‘No. But putting his arm round your waist.’
‘Ah––I remember. But I didn’t know he was going to.’
‘You are wriggling out of it, Sue, and it isn’t quite kind!’
Her ever-sensitive lip began to quiver, and her eye to blink, at
something this reproof was deciding her to say.
‘I know you’ll be angry if I tell you everything, and that’s why I
don’t want to!’
‘Very well, then, dear,’ he said soothingly. ‘I have no real right to
ask you, and I don’t wish to know.’
‘I shall tell you!’ said she, with the perverseness that was part of
her. ‘This is what I have done: I have promised––I have promised––
that I will marry him when I come out of the Training-School two
years hence, and have got my Certi
ficate; his plan being that we shall
At Melchester
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then take a large double school in a great town––he the boys’ and I
the girls’––as married school-teachers often do, and make a good
income between us.’
‘O, Sue! . . . But of course it is right––you couldn’t have done
better!’
He glanced at her and their eyes met, the reproach in his own
belying his words. Then he drew his hand quite away from hers, and
turned his face in estrangement from her to the window. Sue
regarded him passively without moving.
‘I knew you would be angry!’ she said with an air of no emotion
whatever. ‘Very well––I am wrong, I suppose! I ought not to have let
you come to see me. We had better not meet again; and we’ll only
correspond at long intervals on purely business matters!’
This was just the one thing he would not be able to bear, as she
probably knew, and it brought him round at once. ‘O yes, we will,’ he
said quickly. ‘Your being engaged can make no di
fference to me
whatever. I have a perfect right to see you when I want to; and I
shall.’
‘Then don’t let us talk of it any more. It is quite spoiling our
evening together. What does it matter about what one is going to do
two years hence!’
She was something of a riddle to him, and he let the subject drift
away. ‘Shall we go and sit in the Cathedral?’ he asked when their
meal was 
finished.
‘Cathedral? Yes. Though I think I’d rather sit in the railway sta-
tion,’ she answered, a remnant of vexation still in her voice. ‘That’s
the centre of the town life now: the Cathedral has had its day!’
‘How modern you are!’
‘So would you be if you had lived so much in the middle ages as I
have done these last few years! The Cathedral was a very good place
four or 
five centuries ago; but it is played out now . . . I am not
modern, either. I am more ancient than mediævalism, if you only
knew.’
Jude looked distressed.
‘There––I won’t say any more of that!’ she cried. ‘Only you don’t
know how bad I am, from your point of view, or you wouldn’t think
so much of me, or care whether I was engaged or not. Now there’s
just time for us to walk round the Close, then I must go in, or I shall
be locked out for the night.’