"But they are nothing to us!"
"Yes, dear friend, they are. I see marriage differently now. My
babies have been taken from me to show me this! Arabella's child
killing mine was a judgement--the right slaying the wrong. What,
WHAT shall I do! I am such a vile creature--too worthless to mix
with ordinary human beings!"
"This is terrible!" said Jude, verging on tears. "It is monstrous
and unnatural for you to be so remorseful when you have done no
wrong!"
"Ah--you don't know my badness!"
He returned vehemently: "I do! Every atom and dreg of it! You make
me hate Christianity, or mysticism, or Sacerdotalism, or whatever it
may be called, if it's that which has caused this deterioration in
you. That a woman-poet, a woman-seer, a woman whose soul shone like
a diamond--whom all the wise of the world would have been proud of,
if they could have known you--should degrade herself like this! I am
glad I had nothing to do with Divinity--damn glad--if it's going to
ruin you in this way!"
"You are angry, Jude, and unkind to me, and don't see how things
are."
"Then come along home with me, dearest, and perhaps I shall. I am
overburdened--and you, too, are unhinged just now." He put his arm
round her and lifted her; but though she came, she preferred to walk
without his support.
"I don't dislike you, Jude," she said in a sweet and imploring voice.
"I love you as much as ever! Only--I ought not to love you--any
more. Oh I must not any more!"
"I can't own it."
"But I have made up my mind that I am not your wife! I belong to
him--I sacramentally joined myself to him for life. Nothing can
alter it!"
"But surely we are man and wife, if ever two people were in this
world? Nature's own marriage it is, unquestionably!"
"But not Heaven's. Another was made for me there, and ratified
eternally in the church at Melchester."
"Sue, Sue--affliction has brought you to this unreasonable state!
After converting me to your views on so many things, to find you
suddenly turn to the right-about like this--for no reason whatever,
confounding all you have formerly said through sentiment merely!
You root out of me what little affection and reverence I had left in
me for the Church as an old acquaintance... What I can't understand
in you is your extraordinary blindness now to your old logic. Is it
peculiar to you, or is it common to woman? Is a woman a thinking
unit at all, or a fraction always wanting its integer? How you
argued that marriage was only a clumsy contract--which it is--how you
showed all the objections to it--all the absurdities! If two and two
made four when we were happy together, surely they make four now? I
can't understand it, I repeat!"