and
inquired of your cousin about it."

"Ah!" she said with pained surprise.

"I didn't doubt you."

"But you inquired!"

"I took his word."

Her eyes had filled. "HE wouldn't have inquired!" she said.
"But you haven't answered me. Will you let me go away? I know how
irregular it is of me to ask it--"

"It is irregular."

"But I do ask it! Domestic laws should be made according to
temperaments, which should be classified. If people are at all
peculiar in character they have to suffer from the very rules that
produce comfort in others! ... Will you let me?"

"But we married--"

"What is the use of thinking of laws and ordinances," she burst out,
"if they make you miserable when you know you are committing no sin?"

"But you are committing a sin in not liking me."

"I DO like you! But I didn't reflect it would be--that it would be
so much more than that... For a man and woman to live on intimate
terms when one feels as I do is adultery, in any circumstances,
however legal. There--I've said it! ... Will you let me, Richard?"

"You distress me, Susanna, by such importunity!"

"Why can't we agree to free each other? We made the compact, and
surely we can cancel it--not legally of course; but we can morally,
especially as no new interests, in the shape of children, have arisen
to be looked after. Then we might be friends, and meet without pain
to either. Oh Richard, be my friend and have pity! We shall both be
dead in a few years, and then what will it matter to anybody that you
relieved me from constraint for a little while? I daresay you think
me eccentric, or super-sensitive, or something absurd. Well--why
should I suffer for what I was born to be, if it doesn't hurt other
people?"

"But it does--it hurts ME! And you vowed to love me."

"Yes--that's it! I am in the wrong. I always am! It is as culpable
to bind yourself to love always as to believe a creed always, and as
silly as to vow always to like a particular food or drink!"

"And do you mean, by living away from me, living by yourself?"

"Well, if you insisted, yes. But I meant living with Jude."

"As his wife?"

"As I choose."

Phillotson writhed.

Sue continued: "She, or he, 'who lets the world, or his own portion
of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other
faculty than the apelike one of imitation.' J. S. Mill's words,
those are. I have been reading it up. Why can't you act upon them?
I wis