A New New Testament — Jude the Obscure

The landlady's tread on the stairs makes Jude shove the wet clothes under the bed. She sees a young gentleman and brings supper on a tray. After ten Sue wakes, still in his Sunday suit, and says she ought not to be here. He tells her to stay. Green tea makes her talk. She answers his old line about civilisation: she is a sort of negation of it. She has read the classics in translation, mixed with men as if she were one of them, and at eighteen formed a friendship with a Christminster undergraduate who taught her and lent her books.

He asked her to live with him. In London she found he meant a mistress. She said she would go unless they shared rooms as comrades; they did, for fifteen months, until he went abroad ill and came home only to die. She was his only mourner, lost the little money he left, and was not taken back by her father. Jude says that however she has lived, he believes she is as innocent as she is unconventional. She has never yielded herself to any lover. Phillotson already knows and said she was everything to him.

When Jude turns to evening prayers she will not join: it would be hypocrisy. She has no respect for Christminster except on its intellectual side. Intellect and religion there, she says, stand stock-still like two rams. She offers to make him a new New Testament by cutting the books into the order they were written, then mocks the pious headings on Solomon's Song. He calls her Voltairean. She says she wanted to ennoble some man, and thought it might be him, but he takes too much tradition on trust. He takes Christianity. They shake hands like cronies. He wonders if the leader-writer's heart is a warning, then watches her sleep in his great-coat, warm as a new bun, while her incredulities sit in the same chair.