Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/247

 condition; and he was convinced that she was unhappy, although she had not been a month married. But her rushing away thus from home, to see the last of a relative whom she had hardly known in her life, proved nothing, for Sue naturally did such things as those.

"Well, you have my good wishes now, as always, Mrs. Phillotson."

She reproached him by a glance.

"No, you are not Mrs. Phillotson," murmured Jude. "You are dear, free Sue Bridehead, only you don't know it. Wisedom has not yet annihilated and digested you in its vast maw as an atom which has no further individuality.

Sue put on a look of being offended, till she answered, "Nor has husbandom you, so far as I can see!"

"But it has!" he said, shaking his head sadly.

When they reached the lone cottage under the firs, between the Brown House and Marygreen, in which Jude and Arabella had lived and quarrelled, he turned to look at it. A squalid family lived there now. He could not help saying to Sue: "That's the house my wife and I occupied the whole of the time we lived together. I brought her home to that house."

She looked at it. "That to you was what the schoolhouse at Shaston is to me."

"Yes; but I was not very happy there, as you are in yours."

She closed her lips in retortive silence, and they walked some way till she glanced at him to see how he was taking it. "Of course I may have exaggerated your happiness—one never knows," he continued, blandly.

"Don't think that, Jude, for a moment, even though you may have said it to sting me. He's as good to me as a man can be, and gives me perfect liberty—which elderly husbands don't do in general.... If you think I am not happy because he's too old for me, you are wrong."