Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

part of him to weigh its practicability.
At Christminster
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At this time he received a nervously anxious letter from his poor
old aunt, on the subject which had previously distressed her––a fear
that Jude would not be strong-minded enough to keep away from his
cousin Sue Bridehead and her relations. Sue’s father,* his aunt
believed, had gone back to London, but the girl remained at
Christminster. To make her still more objectionable she was an
artist or designer of some sort in what was called an ecclesiastical
warehouse, which was a perfect seed-bed of idolatry, and she was no
doubt abandoned to mummeries on that account––if not quite a
Papist. (Miss Drusilla Fawley was of her date, Evangelical.*)
As Jude was rather on an intellectual track than a theological, this
news of Sue’s probable opinions did not much in
fluence him one
way or the other, but the clue to her whereabouts was decidedly
interesting. With an altogether singular pleasure he walked at his
earliest spare minutes past the shops answering to his great-aunt’s
description; and beheld in one of them a young girl sitting behind a
desk, who was suspiciously like the original of the portrait. He
ventured to enter on a trivial errand, and having made his purchase
lingered on the scene. The shop seemed to be kept entirely by
women. It contained Anglican books, stationery, texts, and fancy
goods: little plaster angels on brackets, Gothic-framed pictures of
saints, ebony crosses that were almost cruci
fixes, prayer-books that
were almost missals. He felt very shy of looking at the girl in the
desk; she was so pretty that he could not believe it possible that she
should belong to him. Then she spoke to one of the two older
women behind the counter; and he recognized in the accents certain
qualities of his own voice; softened and sweetened, but his own.
What was she doing? He stole a glance round. Before her lay a piece
of zinc, cut to the shape of a scroll three or four feet long, and
coated with a dead-surface-paint on one side. Hereon she was
designing or illuminating, in characters of Church text, the single
word
A L L E L U J A
A sweet, saintly, Christian business, hers! thought he.
Her presence here was now fairly enough explained, her skill in
work of this sort having no doubt been acquired from her father’s
occupation as an ecclesiastical worker in metal. The lettering on
Jude the Obscure
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which she was engaged was clearly intended to be 
fixed up in some
chancel to assist devotion.
He came out. It would have been easy to speak to her there and
then, but it seemed scarcely honourable towards his aunt to dis-
regard her request so incontinently. She had used him roughly, but
she had brought him up: and the fact of her being powerless to
control him lent a pathetic force to a wish that would have been
inoperative as an argument.
So Jude gave no sign. He would not call upon Sue just yet. He had
other reasons against doing so when he had walked away. She seemed
so dainty beside himself in his rough working-jacket and dusty trou-
sers that he felt he was as yet unready to encounter her, as he had felt
about Mr Phillotson. And how possible it was that she had inherited
the antipathies of her family, and would scorn him, as far as a
Christian could, particularly when he had told her that unpleasant