"I DO like you! But I didn't reflect it would be--that it would be
so much more than that... For a man and woman to live on intimate
terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances,
however legal. There--I've said it! ... Will you let me, Richard?"
"You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"
"Why can't we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and
surely we can cancel it--not legally of course; but we can morally,
especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen
to be looked after. Then we might be friends, and meet without pain
to either. Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall both be
dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you
relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think
me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd. Well--why
should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn't hurt other
people?"
"But it does--it hurts ME! And you vowed to love me."
"Yes--that's it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable
to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as
silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"
"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"
"Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude."
"As his wife?"
"As I choose."
Phillotson writhed.
Sue continued: "She, or he, 'who lets the world, or his own portion
of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the apelike one of imitation.' J. S. Mill's words,
those are. I have been reading it up. Why can't you act upon them?
I wish to, always."
"What do I care about J. S. Mill!" moaned he. "I only want to lead
a quiet life! Do you mind my saying that I have guessed what never
once occurred to me before our marriage--that you were in love, and
are in love, with Jude Fawley!"
"You may go on guessing that I am, since you have begun. But do you
suppose that if I had been I should have asked you to let me go and
live with him?"
The ringing of the school bell saved Phillotson from the necessity of
replying at present to what apparently did not strike him as being
such a convincing _argumentum ad verecundiam_ as she, in her loss of
courage at the last moment, meant it to appear. She was beginning to
be so puzzling and unstateable that he was ready to throw in with her
other little peculiarities the extremest request which a wife could
make.