`Don't say it! - I know what you mean; but I can't admit so much as that. There! Guess what you like, but don't press me to answer questions!'

`I wish you were happy, whatever I may be!'

`I can't be! So few could enter into my feeling - they would say 'twas my fanciful fastidiousness, or something of that sort, and condemn me.... It is none of the natural tragedies of love that's love's usual tragedy in civilized life, but a tragedy artificially manufactured for people who in a natural state would find relief in parting! ... It would have been wrong, perhaps, for me to tell my distress to you, if I had been able to tell it to anybody else. But I have nobody. And I must tell somebody! Jude, before I married him I had never thought out fully what marriage meant, even though I knew. It was idiotic of me - there is no excuse. I was old enough, and I thought I was very experienced. So I rushed on, when I had got into that training school scrape, with all the cock-sureness of the fool that I was! ... I am certain one ought to be allowed to undo what one had done so ignorantly! I daresay it happens to lots of women, only they submit, and I kick.... When people of a later age look back upon the barbarous customs and superstitions of the times that we have the unhappiness to live in, what will they say!'

`You are very bitter, darling Sue! How I wish - I wish - - '

`You must go in now!'

In a moment of impulse she bent over the sill, and laid her face upon his hair, weeping, and then imprinting a scarcely perceptible little kiss upon the top of his head, withdrawing quickly, so that he could not put his arms round her, as otherwise he unquestionably would have done. She shut the casement, and he returned to his cottage.


  By PanEris using Melati.

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