He tried to soothe her by saying, “That’s bitter of you, darling.”
“But it’s true!”
Thus they waited, and she went back again to her room. The baby’s frock, shoes, and socks, which had been lying on a chair at the time of his death, she would not now have removed, though Jude would fain have got them out of her sight. But whenever he touched them she implored him to let them lie, and burst out almost savagely at the woman of the house when she also attempted to put them away.
Jude dreaded her dull apathetic silences almost more than her paroxysms. “Why don’t you speak to me, Jude?” she cried out, after one of these. “Don’t turn away from me! I can’t bear the loneliness of being out of your looks!”
“There, dear; here I am,” he said, putting his face close to hers.
“Yes… Oh, my comrade, our perfect union—our two-in-oneness—is now stained with blood!”
“Shadowed by death—that’s all.”
“Ah; but it was I who incited him really, though I didn’t know I was doing it! I talked to the child as one should only talk to people of mature age. I said the world was against us, that it was better to be out of life than in it at this price; and he took it literally. And I told him I was going to have another child. It upset him. Oh how bitterly he upbraided me!”
“Why did you do it, Sue?”
“I can’t tell. It was that I wanted to be truthful. I couldn’t bear deceiving him as to the facts of life. And yet I wasn’t truthful, for with a false delicacy I told him too obscurely.—Why was I half-wiser than my fellow-women? And not entirely wiser! Why didn’t I tell him pleasant untruths, instead of half-realities? It was my want of self-control, so that I could neither conceal things nor reveal them!”