The Meeting at the Martyrdoms — Jude the Obscure

Jude is lettering a monument inside a church when he sees Sue in the thin congregation with Miss Fontover. He dares not confront her in the holy spot and goes back up the ladder. Lonely evenings feed the obsession. He tries to pray against it in an empty village church and cannot ask to be delivered when he wants to be tempted. He tells himself it is not erotolepsy this time, but a wish for intellectual sympathy.

Sue comes to the yard asking for him, misses him, and leaves a note: she has only just learned he is in the city, reproaches him for hiding, and says she will soon go away. He names a meeting at the Martyrdoms cross. She will not meet him on that mark and calls him further on. They walk to Lumsdon and find Phillotson still a village schoolmaster, thinner, who does not remember the boy from Marygreen.

The halo around the old teacher falls at a stroke. Walking home, Jude finds Sue so vibrant that an exciting thought makes her walk ahead of him, and he sees that her friendliness is not love. She must leave because Miss Fontover stamped the statues to bits. He offers to ask Phillotson for a teaching post, returns the next evening with arguments about her fitness that he knows nothing about, and writes that she has agreed to come. It does not occur to the schoolmaster that the ardour is anything but family cooperation.