`Well, to tell the truth, when I got inside I felt as if I didn't care much about it. The place depressed me almost as much as it did you - it was ugly. And then I thought of what you had said this morning as to whether we ought.'

They walked on vaguely, till she paused, and her little voice began anew: `It seems so weak, too, to vacillate like this! And yet how much better than to act rashly a second time.... How terrible that scene was to me! The expression in that flabby woman's face, leading her on to give herself to that gaol-bird, not for a few hours, as she would, but for a lifetime, as she must. And the other poor soul - to escape a nominal shame which was owing to the weakness of her character, degrading herself to the real shame of bondage to a tyrant who scorned her - a man whom to avoid for ever was her only chance of salvation.... This is our parish church, isn't it? This is where it would have to be, if we did it in the usual way? A service or something seems to be going on.'

Jude went up and looked in at the door. `Why - it is a wedding here too,' he said. `Everybody seems to be on our tack to-day.'

Sue said she supposed it was because Lent was just over, when there was always a crowd of marriages. `Let us listen,' she said, `and find how it feels to us when performed in a church.'

They stepped in, and entered a back seat, and watched the proceedings at the altar. The contracting couple appeared to belong to the well-to-do middle class, and the wedding altogether was of ordinary prettiness and interest. They could see the flowers tremble in the bride's hand, even at that distance, and could hear her mechanical murmur of words whose meaning her brain seemed to gather not at all under the pressure of her self-consciousness. Sue and Jude listened, and severally saw themselves in time past going through the same form of self-committal.

`It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me doing it over again with my present knowledge,' Sue whispered. `You see, they are fresh to it, and take the proceedings as a matter of course. But having been awakened to its awful solemnity as we have, or at least as I have, by experience, and to my own too squeamish feelings perhaps sometimes, it really does seem immoral in me to go and undertake the same thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and seeing this has frightened me from a church wedding as much as the other did from a registry one.... We are a weak, tremulous pair, Jude, and what others may feel confident in I feel doubts of - my being proof against the sordid conditions of a business contract again!'

Then they tried to laugh, and went on debating in whispers the object-lesson before them. And Jude said he also thought they were both too thin-skinned - that they ought never to have been born - much less have come together for the most preposterous of all joint ventures for them - matrimony.

His betrothed shuddered; and asked him earnestly if he indeed felt that they ought not to go in cold blood and sign that life-undertaking again?' It is awful if you think we have found ourselves not strong enough for it, and knowing this, are proposing to perjure ourselves,' she said.

`I fancy I do think it - since you ask me,' said Jude. `Remember I'll do it if you wish, own darling.' While she hesitated he went on to confess that, though he thought they ought to be able to do it, he felt checked by the dread of incompetency just as she did - from their peculiarities, perhaps, because they were unlike other people. `We are horribly sensitive; that's really what's the matter with us, Sue!' he declared.

`I fancy more are like us than we think!'

`Well, I don't know. The intention of the contract is good, and right for many, no doubt; but in our case it may defeat its own ends because we are the queer sort of people we are - folk in whom domestic ties of a forced kind snuff out cordiality and spontaneousness.'