Page:Hardy - Jude the Obscure, 1896.djvu/80

 "Oh no—it never is nowadays with the better class."

"Nonsense! Perhaps not in towns. But in the country it is supposed to be different. Besides, you've enough of your own, surely? Why, it's a lot!"

"Yes, enough as country notions go. But in towns the men expect more, and when I was barmaid at Aldbrickham—"

"Barmaid at Aldbrickham?"

"Well, not exactly barmaid—I used to draw the drink at a public-house there—just for a little time; that was all. Some people put me up to getting this, and I bought it just for a fancy. The more you have the better in Aldbrickham, which is a finer town than all your Christminsters. Every lady of position wears false hair—the barber's assistant told me so."

Jude thought with a feeling of sickness that though this might be true to some extent, for all that he knew, many unsophisticated girls would and did go to towns and remain there for years without losing their simplicity of life and embellishments. Others, alas, had an instinct towards artificiality in their very blood, and became adepts in counterfeiting at the first glimpse of it. However, perhaps there was no great sin in a woman adding to her hair, and he resolved to think no more of it.

A new-made wife can usually manage to look interesting for a few weeks, even though the prospects of the household ways and means are cloudy. There is a certain piquancy about her situation, and her manner to her acquaintance at the sense of it, which carries off the gloom of facts, and renders even the humblest bride independent a while of the real. Mrs. Jude Fawley was walking in the streets of Alfredston one market-day with this quality in her carriage, when she met Anny, her former friend, whom she had not seen since the wedding.

As usual, they laughed before talking; the world seemed funny to them without saying it.