society as much as possible in public, there would be more loving couples than
there are now. Fancy the secret meetings between the perjuring husband and wife,
the denials of having seen each other, the clambering in at bedroom windows, and
the hiding in closets! There'd be little cooling then.«
    »Yes; but admitting this, or something like it, to be true, you are not the
only one in the world to see it, dear little Sue. People go on marrying because
they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well
that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort. No
doubt my father and mother, and your father and mother, saw it, if they at all
resembled us in habits of observation. But then they went and married just the
same, because they had ordinary passions. But you, Sue, are such a phantasmal,
bodiless creature, one who - if you'll allow me to say it - has so little animal
passion in you, that you can act upon reason in the matter, when we poor
unfortunate wretches of grosser substance can't.«
    »Well,« she sighed, »you've owned that it would probably end in misery for
us. And I am not so exceptional a woman as you think. Fewer women like marriage
than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to
confer, and the social advantages it gains them sometimes - a dignity and an
advantage that I am quite willing to do without.«
    Jude fell back upon his old complaint - that, intimate as they were, he had
never once had from her an honest, candid declaration that she loved or could
love him. »I really fear sometimes that you cannot,« he said, with a dubiousness
approaching anger. »And you are so reticent. I know that women are taught by
other women that they must never admit the full truth to a man. But the highest
form of affection is based on full sincerity on both sides. Not being men, these
women don't know that in looking back on those he has had tender relations with,
a man's heart returns closest to her who was the soul of truth in her conduct.
The better class of man, even if caught by airy affectations of dodging and
parrying, is not retained by them. A Nemesis attends the woman who plays the
game of elusiveness too often, in the utter contempt for her that, sooner or
later, her