Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the
object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were
both too thin-skinned--that they ought never to have been born--much
less have come together for the most preposterous of all joint
ventures for THEM--matrimony.
His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed
felt that they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that
life-undertaking again? "It is awful if you think we have found
ourselves not strong enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing
to perjure ourselves," she said.
"I fancy I do think it--since you ask me," said Jude. "Remember I'll
do it if you wish, own darling." While she hesitated he went on to
confess that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he
felt checked by the dread of incompetency just as she did--from their
peculiarities, perhaps, because they were unlike other people. "We
are horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us,
Sue!" he declared.
"I fancy more are like us than we think!"
"Well, I don't know. The intention of the contract is good, and
right for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends
because we are the queer sort of people we are--folk in whom domestic
ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness."
Sue still held that there was not much queer or exceptional in them:
that all were so. "Everybody is getting to feel as we do. We are
a little beforehand, that's all. In fifty, a hundred, years the
descendants of these two will act and feel worse than we. They
will see weltering humanity still more vividly than we do now, as
Shapes like our own selves hideously multiplied,
and will be afraid to reproduce them."
"What a terrible line of poetry! ... though I have felt it myself
about my fellow-creatures, at morbid times."
Thus they murmured on, till Sue said more brightly: "Well--the general question is not our business, and why should we
plague ourselves about it? However different our reasons are we come
to the same conclusion; that for us particular two, an irrevocable
oath is risky. Then, Jude, let us go home without killing our dream!
Yes? How good you are, my friend: you give way to all my whims!"
"They accord very much with my own."
He gave her a little kiss behind a pillar while the attention of
everybody present was taken up in observing the bridal procession
entering the vestry; and then they came outside the building. By the
door they waited till two or three carriages, which had gone away for
a while, returned, and the new husband and wife came into the open
daylight. Sue sighed.