"I hardly know. Perhaps they would hardly do that. However, I think that we ought to make it legal now—as soon as you are able to go out."
"You think we ought?"
"Certainly."
And Jude fell into thought. "I have seemed to myself lately," he said, "to belong to that vast band of men shunned by the virtuous—the men called seducers. It amazes me when I think of it! I have not been conscious of it, or of any wrongdoing towards you, whom I love more than myself. Yet I am one of those men! I wonder if any other of them are the same purblind, simple creatures as I? … Yes, Sue—that's what I am. I seduced you… You were a distinct type—a refined creature, intended by Nature to be left intact. But I couldn't leave you alone!"
"No, no, Jude!" she said quickly. "Don't reproach yourself with being what you are not. If anybody is to blame it is I."
"I supported you in your resolve to leave Phillotson; and without me perhaps you wouldn't have urged him to let you go."
"I should have, just the same. As to ourselves, the fact of our not having entered into a legal contract is the saving feature in our union. We have thereby avoided insulting, as it were, the solemnity of our first marriages."
"Solemnity?" Jude looked at her with some surprise, and grew conscious that she was not the Sue of their earlier time.
"Yes," she said, with a little quiver in her words, "I have had dreadful fears, a dreadful sense of my own insolence of action. I have thought—that I am still his wife!"
"Whose?"