"How countrified you are!
That's nothing."
"Where did you learn it?"
"Nowhere that I know of. They used to stay without any trouble when I was at the public-house; but now they won't.
My face was fatter then."
"I don't care about dimples.
I don't think they improve a woman—particularly a married woman, and of full-sized figure like you."
"Most men think otherwise."
"I don't care what most men think, if they do.
How do you know?"
"I used to be told so when I was serving in the tap-room."
"Ah—that public-house experience accounts for your knowing about the adulteration of the ale when we went and had some that Sunday evening.
I thought when I married you that you had always lived in your father's house."
"You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more finished than I could have been by staying where I was born.
There was not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away for three months."
"You'll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won't you?"
"How do you mean?"
"Why, of course—little things to make."
"Oh."
"When will it be?
Can't you tell me exactly, instead of in such general terms as you have used?"
"Tell you?"
"Yes—the date."
"There's nothing to tell.
I made a mistake."
"What?"
"It was a mistake."
He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her.
"How can that be?"
"Women fancy wrong things sometimes."
"But—! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn't have hurried on our affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to save you, ready or no… Good God!"
"Don't take on, dear.
What's done can't be undone."
"I have no more to say!" He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between them.
When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a different eye.
As to the point in question he was compelled to accept her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while ordinary notions prevailed.
But how came they to prevail?
There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing his units of work to the general progress of his generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness.
He was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime?
There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent.
But the marriage remained.
X
The time arrived for killing the pig which Jude and his wife had fattened in their sty during the autumn months, and the butchering was timed to take place as soon as it was light in the morning, so that Jude might get to Alfredston without losing more than a quarter of a day.
The night had seemed strangely silent.
Jude looked out of the window long before dawn, and perceived that the ground was covered with snow—snow rather deep for the season, it seemed, a few flakes still falling.
"I'm afraid the pig-killer won't be able to come," he said to Arabella.
"Oh, he'll come.
You must get up and make the water hot, if you want Challow to scald him.
Though I like singeing best."
"I'll get up," said Jude.