d assert mere
sportiveness on his part as his reason in seeking her--something in
her quite antipathetic to that side of him which had been occupied
with literary study and the magnificent Christminster dream. It had
been no vestal who chose THAT missile for opening her attack on him.
He saw this with his intellectual eye, just for a short; fleeting
while, as by the light of a falling lamp one might momentarily see an
inscription on a wall before being enshrouded in darkness. And then
this passing discriminative power was withdrawn, and Jude was lost to
all conditions of things in the advent of a fresh and wild pleasure,
that of having found a new channel for emotional interest hitherto
unsuspected, though it had lain close beside him. He was to meet
this enkindling one of the other sex on the following Sunday.

Meanwhile the girl had joined her companions, and she silently
resumed her flicking and sousing of the chitterlings in the pellucid
stream.

"Catched un, my dear?" laconically asked the girl called Anny.

"I don't know. I wish I had thrown something else than that!"
regretfully murmured Arabella.

"Lord! he's nobody, though you med think so. He used to drive old
Drusilla Fawley's bread-cart out at Marygreen, till he 'prenticed
himself at Alfredston. Since then he's been very stuck up, and
always reading. He wants to be a scholar, they say."

"Oh, I don't care what he is, or anything about 'n. Don't you think
it, my child!"

"Oh, don't ye! You needn't try to deceive us! What did you stay
talking to him for, if you didn't want un? Whether you do or whether
you don't, he's as simple as a child. I could see it as you courted
on the bridge, when he looked at 'ee as if he had never seen a woman
before in his born days. Well, he's to be had by any woman who can
get him to care for her a bit, if she likes to set herself to catch
him the right way."

VII

The next day Jude Fawley was pausing in his bedroom with the sloping
ceiling, looking at the books on the table, and then at the black
mark on the plaster above them, made by the smoke of his lamp in past
months.

It was Sunday afternoon, four-and-twenty hours after his meeting with
Arabella Donn. During the whole bygone week he had been resolving to
set this afternoon apart for a special purpose,--the re-reading of
his Greek Testament--his new one, with better type than his old copy,
following Griesbach's text as amended by numerous cor