SUE (20s)

Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

(to Jude)

I can’t talk to you any longer, Jude! It is getting too dark to stay together like this, after playing morbid Good Friday tunes that make one feel what one shouldn’t. We mustn’t sit and talk in this way anymore. Yes- you must go away, for you mistake me! I am very much the reverse of what you say so cruelly- O Jude, it was cruel to say that! Yet I can’t tell you the truth-I should shock you by letting you know how I give way to my impulses, and how much I feel that I shouldn’t have been provided with attractiveness unless it were meant to be exercised! Some women’s love of being loved is insatiable; and so, often, is their love of loving; and in the last case you may find that they can’t give it continuously to the chamber-officer appointed by the bishop’s licence to receive it. But you are so straightforward, Jude, that you can’t understand me!

...Now you must go. I am sorry my husband is not at home. I perceive that I have said that in mere conversation. Honestly, I don’t think I am sorry. It does not matter, either way, sad to say!

It does seem hard of me to pack you off so! Stay there. Where you are, I can talk to you better like this than when you were inside. It was so kind and tender of you to give half a day’s work to come to see me! You are Joseph the dreamer of dreams. And sometimes you are Saint Stephen, who, while they were stoning him, could see Heaven opened. O my poor friend and comrade, you’ll suffer yet!

I have been thinking, that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns; I am called Mrs Richard Phillostson, living a calm wedded life with my counterpart of that name. But I am not really Mrs Richard Phillotson, but a woman tossed about, all alone, with aberrant passions and unaccountable antipathies....

Now you mustn’t wait any longer, or you will lose the coach. Come and see me again. You must come to the house then. Tomorrow week. Good bye. Good bye.

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