one translation to plain minds.

Little Time--for though he was formally turned into "Jude," the apt
nickname stuck to him--would come home from school in the evening,
and repeat inquiries and remarks that had been made to him by the
other boys; and cause Sue, and Jude when he heard them, a great deal
of pain and sadness.

The result was that shortly after the attempt at the registrar's the
pair went off--to London it was believed--for several days, hiring
somebody to look to the boy. When they came back they let it be
understood indirectly, and with total indifference and weariness
of mien, that they were legally married at last. Sue, who had
previously been called Mrs. Bridehead now openly adopted the name of
Mrs. Fawley. Her dull, cowed, and listless manner for days seemed
to substantiate all this.

But the mistake (as it was called) of their going away so secretly
to do the business, kept up much of the mystery of their lives; and
they found that they made not such advances with their neighbours as
they had expected to do thereby. A living mystery was not much less
interesting than a dead scandal.

The baker's lad and the grocer's boy, who at first had used to lift
their hats gallantly to Sue when they came to execute their errands,
in these days no longer took the trouble to render her that homage,
and the neighbouring artizans' wives looked straight along the
pavement when they encountered her.

Nobody molested them, it is true; but an oppressive atmosphere began
to encircle their souls, particularly after their excursion to the
show, as if that visit had brought some evil influence to bear on
them. And their temperaments were precisely of a kind to suffer from
this atmosphere, and to be indisposed to lighten it by vigorous and
open statements. Their apparent attempt at reparation had come too
late to be effective.

The headstone and epitaph orders fell off: and two or three months
later, when autumn came, Jude perceived that he would have to return
to journey-work again, a course all the more unfortunate just now,
in that he had not as yet cleared off the debt he had unavoidably
incurred in the payment of the law-costs of the previous year.

One evening he sat down to share the common meal with Sue and the
child as usual. "I am thinking," he said to her, "that I'll hold on
here no longer. The life suits us, certainly; but if we could get
away to a place where we are unknown, we should be lighter