Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/369

 mess of it, it strikes me. Still, anything that pleases you will please me."

"But Jude, dearest, I am worrying you! You wanted it to be there, didn't you?"

"Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn't care much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did you; it was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this morning as to whether we ought."

They walked on vaguely till she paused, and her little voice began anew: "It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much better than to act rashly a second time.... How terrible that scene was to me! The expression in that flabby woman's face, leading her on to give herself to that jail-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul—to escape a nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her—a man whom to avoid forever was her only chance of salvation.... This is our parish church, isn't it? This is where it would have to be if we did it in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going on."

Jude went up and looked in at the door. "Why, it is a wedding here too," he said. "Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day."

Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there was always a crowd of marriages. "Let us listen," she said, "and find how it feels to us when performed in a church."

They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to the well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary prettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in the bride's hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to