`You ought to have known better than that, and seen I was a little more finished than I could have been by staying where I was born. There was not much to do at home, and I was eating my head off, so I went away for three months.'

`You'll soon have plenty to do now, dear, won't you?'

`How do you mean?'

`Why, of course - little things to make.'

`Oh.'

`When will it be? Can't you tell me exactly, instead of in such general terms as you have used?'

`Tell you?'

`Yes - the date.'

`There's nothing to tell. I made a mistake.'

`What?'

`It was a mistake.'

He sat bolt upright in bed and looked at her. `How can that be?'

`Women fancy wrong things sometimes.'

`But - ! Why, of course, so unprepared as I was, without a stick of furniture, and hardly a shilling, I shouldn't have hurried on our affair, and brought you to a half-furnished hut before I was ready, if it had not been for the news you gave me, which made it necessary to save you, ready or no.... Good God!'

`Don't take on, dear. What's done can't be undone.'

`I have no more to say!'

He gave the answer simply, and lay down; and there was silence between them.

When Jude awoke the next morning he seemed to see the world with a different eye. As to the point in question he was compelled to accept her word; in the circumstances he could not have acted otherwise while ordinary notions prevailed. But how came they to prevail?

There seemed to him, vaguely and dimly, something wrong in a social ritual which made necessary a cancelling of well-formed schemes involving years of thought and labour, of foregoing a man's one opportunity of showing himself superior to the lower animals, and of contributing his units of work to the general progress of his generation, because of a momentary surprise by a new and transitory instinct which had nothing in it of the nature of vice, and could be only at the most called weakness. He was inclined to inquire what he had done, or she lost, for that matter, that he deserved to be caught in a gin which would cripple him, if not her also, for the rest of a lifetime? There was perhaps something fortunate in the fact that the immediate reason of his marriage had proved to be non-existent. But the marriage remained.