Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/218

 a perfect Voltaire! But you must treat me as you will!"

When she saw how wretched he was she softened, and, trying to blink away her sympathetic tears, said, with all the winning reproachfulness of a heart-hurt woman: "Ah—you should have told me before you gave me that idea that you wanted to be allowed to love me! I had no feeling before that moment at the railway-station, except—" For once Sue was as miserable as he, in her attempts to keep herself free from emotion, and her less than half-success.

"Don't cry, dear!" he implored.

"I am—not crying—because I love you; but because of your want of—confidence!" They were quite screened from the Market-square without, and he could not help putting out his arm towards her waist. His momentary desire was the means of her rallying. "No, no!" she said, drawing back stringently, and wiping her eyes. "Of course not! It would be hypocrisy to pretend that it would be meant as from my cousin; and it can't be in any other way."

They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself recovered. It was distracting to Jude, and his heart would have ached less had she appeared anyhow but as she did appear—essentially large-minded and generous on reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow womanly humors on impulse that were necessary to give her sex.

"I don't blame you for what you couldn't help," she said, smiling. "How should I be so foolish! I do blame you a little bit for not telling me before. But, after all, it doesn't matter. We should have had to keep apart, you see, even if this had not been in your life."

"No, we shouldn't, Sue! This is the only obstacle!"

"You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be your wife, even if there had been no obstacle," said Sue, with a gentle seriousness which did not reveal her