Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/371

 "I fancy more are like us than we think!"

"Well, I don't know. The intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends, because we are the queer sort of people we are—folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."

Sue still held that there was nothing queer or exceptional in it—that all were so. "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, aye, twenty years, the descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as

and will be afraid to reproduce them."

"What a terrible line of poetry!... though I have felt it myself about my fellow-creatures at morbid times."

Thus they murmured on, till Sue said, more brightly:

"Well, the general question is not our business, and why should we plague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are, we come to the same conclusion that for us particular two an irrevocable oath is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream! Yes? How good you are, my friend; you give way to all my whims!"

"They accord very much with my own."

He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession entering the vestry, and then they came outside the building. By the door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for a while returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open daylight. Sue sighed.

"The flowers in the bride's hand are sadly like the garand which decked the heifers of sacrifice in old times!"

"Still, Sue, it is no worse for the woman than for the