“Ah—it isn’t true!” she said with gentle resentment. “You are teasing me—that’s all—because you think I am not happy!”
“I don’t know. I don’t wish to know.”
“If I were unhappy it would be my fault, my wickedness; not that I should have a right to dislike him! He is considerate to me in everything; and he is very interesting, from the amount of general knowledge he has acquired by reading everything that comes in his way. … Do you think, Jude, that a man ought to marry a woman his own age, or one younger than himself—eighteen years—as I am than he?”
“It depends upon what they feel for each other.”
He gave her no opportunity of self-satisfaction, and she had to go on unaided, which she did in a vanquished tone, verging on tears:
“I—I think I must be equally honest with you as you have been with me. Perhaps you have seen what it is I want to say?—that though I like Mr. Phillotson as a friend, I don’t like him—it is a torture to me to—live with him as a husband!—There, now I have let it out—I couldn’t help it, although I have been—pretending I am happy.—Now you’ll have a contempt for me for ever, I suppose!” She bent down her face upon her hands as they lay upon the cloth, and silently sobbed in little jerks that made the fragile three-legged table quiver.
“I have only been married a month or two!” she went on, still remaining bent upon the table, and sobbing into her hands. “And it is said that what a woman shrinks from—in the early days of her marriage—she shakes down to with comfortable indifference in half a dozen years. But that is much like saying that the amputation of a limb is no affliction, since a person gets comfortably accustomed to the use of a wooden leg or arm in the course of time!”
Jude could hardly speak, but he said, “I thought there was something wrong, Sue! Oh, I thought there was!”
“But it is not as you think!—there is nothing wrong except my own wickedness, I suppose you’d call it—a repugnance on my part, for a reason I cannot disclose, and what would not be admitted as one by the world in general! … What tortures me so much is the necessity of being responsive to this man whenever he wishes, good as he is morally!—the dreadful contract to feel in a particular way in a matter whose essence is its voluntariness! … I wish he would beat me, or be faithless to me, or do some open thing that I could talk about as a justification for feeling as I do! But he does nothing, except that he has grown a little cold since he has found out how I feel. That’s why he didn’t come to the funeral… Oh, I am very miserable—I don’t know what to do! … Don’t come near me, Jude, because you mustn’t. Don’t—don’t!”
But he had jumped up and put his face against hers—or rather against her ear, her face being inaccessible.