That Look Behind — Jude the Obscure

They stand on the silent highway after the funeral and almost quarrel over a farewell kiss. She will allow it as a cousin. He will not swear it is only that. They walk apart twenty or thirty yards, look back at the same instant, run, and kiss close and long. He comes home with a face of exaltation. In the cottage he sees what Sue said in warmth as cold truth: he cannot nourish this tenderness and still become the soldier of a religion that calls sexual love a frailty. At dusk he digs a shallow hole and burns Jeremy Taylor, Butler, Doddridge, Paley, Pusey, and Newman with a three-pronged fork. Passing cottagers think he is burning his aunt's rubbish. By one o'clock he is no longer a hypocrite to himself.

Sue walks to the station in tears for having run back. She will not write, so he will suffer. On the omnibus she tells Phillotson she let Mr. Fawley hold her hand. She does not mention the kiss. That night she is not in the brass bed he bought her. He finds her in a nest of rugs under the stairs, the closet fastened with string. What must a woman's aversion be, he says in the morning, when it is stronger than her fear of spiders.

At breakfast, under burghers nodding to the happy couple, she asks to live away from him. She meant living with Jude. He has already guessed she loves her cousin. School-bell notes pass between the glass partition: her request was seriously made; she does not want to be respectable; if he will not let her go, will he allow a separate way in the house. He is disposed to agree. He keeps his word. At meals she talks vaguely and indiscriminately, so he cannot talk pertinently.