Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/201

 you!" he said, taking her hand, and surprised at her introducing personal feeling into mere argument.

"Yes, you are—yes, you are!" she cried, turning away her face that he might not see her brimming eyes. You are on the side of the people in the Training-School—at least, you seem almost to be! What I insist on is, that to explain such verses as this: 'Whither is thy beloved gone, O thou fairest among women?' by the note: The Church professeth her faith is supremely ridiculous!"

"Well, then, let it be! You make such a personal matter of everything! I am—only too inclined just now to apply the words profanely. You know, you are fairest among women to me, come to that!"

"But you are not to say it now!" Sue replied, her voice changing to its softest note of severity. Then their eyes met, and they shook hands like cronies in a tavern, and Jude saw the absurdity of quarrelling on such a hypothetical subject, and she the silliness of crying about what was written in an old book like the Bible.

"I won't disturb your convictions—I really won't!" she went on soothingly, for now he was rather more ruffled than she. "But I did want and long to ennoble some man to high aims; and when I saw you, and knew you wanted to be my comrade, I—shall I confess it?—thought that man might be you. But you take so much tradition on trust that I don't know what to say."

"Well, dear, I suppose one must take some things on trust. Life isn't long enough to work out everything in Euclid problems before you believe it. I take Christianity."

"Well, perhaps you might take something worse."

"Indeed I might. Perhaps I have done so." He thought of Arabella.

"I won't ask what, because we are going to be very nice with each other, aren't we, and never, never vex each other any more?" She looked up trustfully, and her voice seemed trying to nestle in his breast.