e 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