The Three Ages of Woman

The Three Ages of Woman
The Three Ages of Woman
The Virgin and Child with St Anne
The Water lily Pond
The building by which they stood was the market-house, it was the only place available; and they entered, the market being over, and the stalls and areas empty. He would have preferred a more congenial spot, but, as usually happens, in place of a romantic field or solemn aisle for his tale, it was told while they walked up and down over a floor littered with rotten cabbage-leaves, and amid all the usual squalors of decayed vegetable matter and unsaleable refuse. He began and finished his brief narrative, which merely led up to the information that he had married a wife some years earlier, and that his wife was living still. Almost before her countenance had time to change she hurried out the words, ¡¡¡¡ "Why didn't you tell me before!" ¡¡¡¡ "I couldn't. It seemed so cruel to tell it." ¡¡¡¡ "To yourself, Jude. So it was better to be cruel to me!" ¡¡¡¡ "No, dear darling!" cried Jude passionately. He tried to take her hand, but she withdrew it. Their old relations of confidence seemed suddenly to have ended, and the antagonisms of sex to sex were left without any counter-poising predilections. She was his comrade, friend, unconscious sweetheart no longer; and her eyes regarded him in estranged silence. ¡¡¡¡ "I was ashamed of the episode in my life which brought about the marriage," he continued. "I can't explain it precisely now. I could have done it if you had taken it differently!" ¡¡¡¡ "But how can I?" she burst out. "Here I have been saying, or writing, that--that you might love me, or something of the sort!-- just out of charity--and all the time--oh, it is perfectly damnable how things are!" she said, stamping her foot in a nervous quiver.