Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/249

 woman of any niceness can stomach. I should have said he was one. I don't say so now, since you must ha' known better than I—but that's what I should have said!"

Sue jumped up and went out. Jude followed her, and found her in the outhouse, crying.

"Don't cry, dear," said Jude, in distress. "She means well, but is very crusty and queer now, you know."

"Oh no—it isn't that," said Sue, trying to dry her eyes. "I don't mind her roughness one bit."

"What is it, then?"

"It is that what she says is—is true!"

"God—what—you don't like him?" asked Jude.

"I don't mean that!" she said, hastily. "That I ought—perhaps I ought not to have married!"

He wondered if she had really been going to say that at first. They went back, and the subject was smoothed over, and her aunt took rather kindly to Sue, telling her that not many young women newly married would have come so far to see a sick old crone like her. In the afternoon Sue prepared to depart, Jude hiring a neighbor to drive her to Alfredston.

"I'll go with you to the station, if you'd like?" he said.

She would not let him. The man came round with the trap, and Jude helped her into it, perhaps with unnecessary attention, for she looked at him prohibitively.

"I suppose—I may come to see you some day, when I am back again at Melchester?" he half-crossly observed.

She bent down and said, softly, "No, dear—you are not to come yet. I don't think you are in a good mood."

"Very well," said Jude. "Good-bye!"

"Good-bye!" She waved her hand and was gone.

"She's right! I won't go!" he murmured.

He passed the evening and following days in mortifying by every possible means his wish to see her, nearly starving himself in attempts to extinguish by fasting his passionate tendency to love her. He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history