"Well, it's only a bit of fun," he said to himself, faintly conscious

that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more

obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had

drawn him to her which made it necessary that he should assert mere

sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her--something in

her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied

with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had

been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him.

He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting

while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an

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inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then

this passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to

all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure,

that of having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto

unsuspected, though it had lain close beside him. He was to meet

this enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.

Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently

resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid

stream.

"Catched un, my dear?" laconically asked the girl called Anny.

"I don't know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!"

regretfully murmured Arabella.

"Lord! he's nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old

Drusilla Fawley's bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he 'prenticed

himself at Alfredston. Since then he's been very stuck up, and

always reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say."

"Oh, I don't care what he is, or anything about 'n. Don't you think

it, my child!"

"Oh, don't ye! You needn't try to deceive us! What did you stay

talking to him for, if you didn't want un? Whether you do or whether

you don't, he's as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted

on the bridge, when he looked at 'ee as if he had never seen a woman

before in his born days. Well, he's to be had by any woman who can

get him to care for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch

him the right way."

VII

The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping

ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black

mark on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past

months.




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