Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/434

 than her paroxysms. "Why don't you speak to me, Jude?" she said, after one of these. "Don't turn away from me! I can't bear the loneliness of being out of your looks!"

"There, dear; here I am," he said, putting his face close to hers.

"Yes.... Oh, my comrade, our perfect union-our two-in-oneness—is now stained with blood!"

"Shadowed by death—that's all."

"Ah; but it was I who incited him, really, though I didn't know I was doing it. I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be out of life than in it at this price, and he took it literally. And I told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh, how bitterly he upbraided me!"

"Why did you do it, Sue?"

"I can't tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful couldn't bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn't truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely. Why was I half wiser than my fellow-women, and not entirely wiser? Why didn't I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half realities? It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them."

"Your plan might have been a good one for the majority of cases, only in our peculiar case it chanced to work badly perhaps. He must have known sooner or later."

"And I was just making my baby darling a new frock, and now I shall never see him in it, and never talk to him any more!... My eyes are so swollen that I can scarcely see; and yet little more than a year ago I called myself happy! We went about loving each other too much—indulging ourselves to utter selfishness with each other! We said—do you remember?—that we would make a virtue of joy. I said it was Nature's intention,