Jude the Obscure: Part Third

The old fancy which had led on to the culminating vision of the bishopric had not been an ethical or theological enthusiasm at all, but a mundane ambition masquerading in a surplice.

At nine o'clock the names were called, Sue's being pronounced three times sonorously by Miss Traceley without eliciting an answer.

However, they remained stolid and motionless, and the mistress left the room to inquire from her superiors what was to be done.

But tonight, having finished tea and brushed himself up, he was deep in the perusal of the Twenty-ninth Volume of Pusey's Library of the Fathers, a set of books which he had purchased of a second-hand dealer at a price that seemed to him to be one of miraculous cheapness for that invaluable work.

"Is it? Do I strike you as being learned?" she asked, with a touch of raillery.

Her speech had grown spirited, and almost petulant at his rebuke, and her eyes moist.

I admit that our meeting as strangers prevented a sense of relationship, and that it was a sort of subterfuge to avail myself of it.

But the next morning when he awoke he felt rather vexed with her, and decided that she was rather unreasonable, not to say capricious.

A resumption of this investigation was the outward and apparent hobby of Phillotson at present — his ostensible reason for going alone into fields where causeways, dykes, and tumuli abounded, or shutting himself up in his house with a few urns, tiles, and mosaics he had collected, instead of calling round upon his new neighbours, who for their part had showed themselves willing enough to be friendly with him.

There the news of her departure — expulsion as it might almost have been considered — was flashed upon him without warning or mitigation as he stood at the door expecting in a few minutes to behold her face; and when he turned away he could hardly see the road before him.

Jude immediately moved into more commodious quarters, as much to escape the espionage of the suspicious landlady who had been one cause of Sue's unpleasant experience as for the sake of room.

How could Sue have had the temerity to ask him to do it — a cruelty possibly to herself as well as to him?

Passing the evening, therefore, in a desultory waiting about the town wherein he avoided the precincts of every cloister and hall, because he could not bear to behold them, he repaired to the tavern bar while the hundred and one strokes were resounding from the Great Bell of Cardinal College, a coincidence which seemed to him gratuitous irony.

Looking at his loved one as she appeared to him now, in his tender thought the sweetest and most disinterested comrade that he had ever had, living largely in vivid imaginings, so ethereal a creature that her spirit could be seen trembling through her limbs, he felt heartily ashamed of his earthliness in spending the hours he had spent in Arabella's company.

He now returned with feverish desperation to his study for the priesthood — in the recognition that the single-mindedness of his aims, and his fidelity to the cause, had been more than questionable of late.