"What made either of the others throw it, I wonder?" Jude asked,
politely accepting her assertion, though he had very large doubts as
to its truth.
"Impudence. Don't tell folk it was I, mind!"
"How can I? I don't know your name."
"Ah, no. Shall I tell it to you?"
"Do!"
"Arabella Donn. I'm living here."
"I must have known it if I had often come this way. But I mostly go
straight along the high-road."
"My father is a pig-breeder, and these girls are helping me wash the
innerds for black-puddings and such like."
They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding
each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge. The
unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly
by Arabella's personality, held Jude to the spot against his
intention--almost against his will, and in a way new to his
experience. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this
moment Jude had never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but
had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes.
He gazed from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her
full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and
firm as marble.
"What a nice-looking girl you are!" he murmured, though the words had
not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism.
"Ah, you should see me Sundays!" she said piquantly.
"I don't suppose I could?" he answered "That's for you to think on. There's nobody after me just now,
though there med be in a week or two." She had spoken this without
a smile, and the dimples disappeared.
Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. "Will
you let me?"
"I don't mind."
By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning
her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking
operation before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than
a general impression of her appearance. "Next Sunday?" he hazarded.
"To-morrow, that is?"
"Yes."
"Shall I call?"
"Yes."
She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost
tenderly with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the
brookside grass rejoined her companions.
Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way,
filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had
just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had
evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not
how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as
by a sheet of glass. The intentions as to reading, working, and
learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes
earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not
how.