“I want a humble heart; and a chastened mind; and I have never had them yet!”
“You have been fearless, both as a thinker and as a feeler, and you deserved more admiration than I gave. I was too full of narrow dogmas at that time to see it.”
“Don’t say that, Jude! I wish my every fearless word and thought could be rooted out of my history. Self-renunciation—that’s everything! I cannot humiliate myself too much. I should like to prick myself all over with pins and bleed out the badness that’s in me!”
“Hush!” he said, pressing her little face against his breast as if she were an infant. “It is bereavement that has brought you to this! Such remorse is not for you, my sensitive plant, but for the wicked ones of the earth—who never feel it!”
“I ought not to stay like this,” she murmured, when she had remained in the position a long while.
“Why not?”
“It is indulgence.”
“Still on the same tack! But is there anything better on earth than that we should love one another?”
“Yes. It depends on the sort of love; and yours—ours—is the wrong.”
“I won’t have it, Sue! Come, when do you wish our marriage to be signed in a vestry?”