They moved on a dozen paces, and she showed herself recovered. It was distracting to Jude, and his heart would have ached less had she appeared anyhow but as she did appear; essentially large-minded and generous on reflection, despite a previous exercise of those narrow womanly humours on impulse that were necessary to give her sex.
“I don’t blame you for what you couldn’t help,” she said, smiling. “How should I be so foolish? I do blame you a little bit for not telling me before. But, after all, it doesn’t matter. We should have had to keep apart, you see, even if this had not been in your life.”
“No, we shouldn’t, Sue! This is the only obstacle.”
“You forget that I must have loved you, and wanted to be your wife, even if there had been no obstacle,” said Sue, with a gentle seriousness which did not reveal her mind. “And then we are cousins, and it is bad for cousins to marry. And—I am engaged to somebody else. As to our going on together as we were going, in a sort of friendly way, the people round us would have made it unable to continue. Their views of the relations of man and woman are limited, as is proved by their expelling me from the school. Their philosophy only recognizes relations based on animal desire. The wide field of strong attachment where desire plays, at least, only a secondary part, is ignored by them—the part of—who is it?—Venus Urania.”
Her being able to talk learnedly showed that she was mistress of herself again; and before they parted she had almost regained her vivacious glance, her reciprocity of tone, her gay manner, and her second-thought attitude of critical largeness towards others of her age and sex.
He could speak more freely now. “There were several reasons against my telling you rashly. One was what I have said; another, that it was always impressed upon me that I ought not to marry—that I belonged to an odd and peculiar family—the wrong breed for marriage.”
“Ah—who used to say that to you?”
“My great-aunt. She said it always ended badly with us Fawleys.”
“That’s strange. My father used to say the same to me!”
They stood possessed by the same thought, ugly enough, even as an assumption: that a union between them, had such been possible, would have meant a terrible intensification of unfitness—two bitters in one dish.