You'll Rue This Marrying — Jude the Obscure

In the morning carriage Arabella looks frowsy. On the Alfredston road Jude names the highway he once walked full of plans. She will not come to the dying aunt. Then she extracts a promise and tells the rest: she legally married the Sydney hotel manager and lived with him till she left. Why the devil didn't you tell me last night, he says. She calls it no crime in the colony and offers to go back to the man. He has nothing more to say about the crime. They part. He stands at Fourways seeing only her midnight contiguity.

Sue appears like a vision. She sat up at Marygreen, feared he had drowned his gloom as after the college letters, and came on the morning train to hunt him. He was not drinking. He had an appointment at nine. She asks where he stayed; he says an inn, and keeps the Australian marriage off the seat because it might injure his ignorant wife. On the walk to the cottage she recites model praise of Phillotson. You ought to be a happy wife, he says. And of course I am. Her voice is lifeless. At the old cottage under the firs he shows her the house he shared with Arabella. That to you was what the school-house at Shaston is to me, she answers.

Aunt Drusilla is downstairs in blankets, a Lazarus. She tells Sue she will rue this marrying as well as he. Sue jumps to the outhouse and weeps: what the aunt says is true. She will not quite say she does not like him. She says she ought perhaps not to have married. She will not let Jude come to Shaston yet. He fasts and reads ascetics. Then a London letter: the Australian has taken a public in Lambeth, two hundred a month, and she has gone to him. She belongs to that husband more, she writes, and asks Jude not to inform against a weak woman.