ether, which would be
twice as bad as before... I think I should begin to be afraid of
you, Jude, the moment you had contracted to cherish me under a
Government stamp, and I was licensed to be loved on the premises by
you--Ugh, how horrible and sordid! Although, as you are, free, I
trust you more than any other man in the world."

"No, no--don't say I should change!" he expostulated; yet there was
misgiving in his own voice also.

"Apart from ourselves, and our unhappy peculiarities, it is foreign
to a man's nature to go on loving a person when he is told that
he must and shall be that person's lover. There would be a much
likelier chance of his doing it if he were told not to love. If the
marriage ceremony consisted in an oath and signed contract between
the parties to cease loving from that day forward, in consideration
of personal possession being given, and to avoid each other's society
as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples
than there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring
husband and wife, the denials of having seen each other, the
clambering in at bedroom windows, and the hiding in closets! There'd
be little cooling then."

"Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are
not the only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue. People go
on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many
of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a
month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. No doubt my father and
mother, and your father and mother, saw it, if they at all resembled
us in habits of observation. But then they went and married just the
same, because they had ordinary passions. But you, Sue, are such a
phantasmal, bodiless creature, one who--if you'll allow me to say
it--has so little animal passion in you, that you can act upon reason
in the matter, when we poor unfortunate wretches of grosser substance
can't."

"Well," she sighed, "you've owned that it would probably end in
misery for us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think.
Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it
for the dignity it is assumed to confer, and the social advantages
it gains them sometimes--a dignity and an advantage that I am quite
willing to do without."

Jude fell back upon his old complaint--that, intimate as they were,
he had never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she
l