and such like.” They talked a little more and a little more, as they stood regarding each other and leaning against the hand-rail of the bridge. The unvoiced call of woman to man, which was uttered very distinctly by Arabella’s personality, held Jude to the spot against his intention—almost against his will, and in a way new to his experience. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that till this moment Jude had never looked at a woman to consider her as such, but had vaguely regarded the sex as beings outside his life and purposes. He gazed from her eyes to her mouth, thence to her bosom, and to her full round naked arms, wet, mottled with the chill of the water, and firm as marble. “What a nice-looking girl you are!” he murmured, though the words had not been necessary to express his sense of her magnetism. “Ah, you should see me Sundays!” she said piquantly. “I don’t suppose I could?” he answered “That’s for you to think on. There’s nobody after me just now, though there med be in a week or two.” She had spoken this without a smile, and the dimples disappeared. Jude felt himself drifting strangely, but could not help it. “Will you let me?” “I don’t mind.” By this time she had managed to get back one dimple by turning her face aside for a moment and repeating the odd little sucking operation before mentioned, Jude being still unconscious of more than a general impression of her appearance. “Next Sunday?” he hazarded. “To-morrow, that is?” “Yes.” “Shall I call?” “Yes.” She brightened with a little glow of triumph, swept him almost tenderly with her eyes in turning, and retracing her steps down the brookside grass rejoined her companions. Jude Fawley shouldered his tool-basket and resumed his lonely way, filled with an ardour at which he mentally stood at gaze. He had just inhaled a single breath from a new atmosphere, which had evidently been hanging round him everywhere he went, for he knew not how long, but had somehow been divided from his actual breathing as by a sheet of glass. The intentions as to reading, working, and learning, which he had so precisely formulated only a few minutes earlier, were suffering a curious collapse into a corner, he knew not how. “Well, it’s only a bit of fun,” he said to himself, faintly conscious that to common sense there was something lacking, and still more obviously something redundant in the nature of this girl who had drawn him to her which made it necessary that he should 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 

 Prev. P 27/353 next