Venus and Apollo in Brown Paper — Jude the Obscure

The next Sunday Jude goes to Cardinal College cathedral to watch Sue without being known. She arrives along the quadrangle; he follows her in. The choir chants the 119th Psalm: Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way? He takes it as set for him, then remembers it is the ordinary psalm for the twenty-fourth evening. After the service he almost follows her in his Sunday suit, then tells himself a married man must not know her. The ecclesiastical glow had felt like Cyprus as much as Galilee.

Some time before that service, Sue on a holiday walk meets an image-seller at a stile and buys a Venus and an Apollo she cannot quite afford. She wraps them in burdock leaves so the city will see only green stuff, telling herself anything is better than church fallals, and lies to Miss Fontover that they are St. Peter and St. Mary Magdalen.

That night she sets the figures between candles, reads Gibbon on Julian, then Swinburne's line about the pale Galilean. She keeps waking to the white plaster against the Calvary print. At the same small hour, a few streets away, Jude sits over Griesbach and recites Greek aloud until the book closes.