Re: [jude & hannah: tea]
Had he the insight as to what path Hannah was trotting down, Jude would have laughed himself sick. Louis was furthest thing from marriage and genteel girls and hard living, Louis whose hands had probably never seen blisters and calluses. The tea-cup twirling ceased and Jude's gaze dropped to the gold-china rim as it did, but when he lifted his face, merriment was worn clear as lights at Christmas. "I'm afraid he's not rough, sunshine. Louis is a gentleman, I think, which means he can't be a laird the way you say they must be." But Jude was fond of the friend who'd bestowed a pocket knife and whose family required navigational maps clear as Jude's own.
The self-examination of inappropriate tree-climbing wear and Jude had never had to consider skirts, but they didn't look practical. He'd never asked a woman why they wore what they wore, it seemed dangerous and fraught with misunderstanding. So he looked at her across the table, and shrugged a shoulder. "Buy a pair of jeans and I'll teach you, sunshine. Call it an adventure." The woods were familiar, even if it was token space surrounding the house in the woods and Jude hadn't been back for months and months. The old piano was probably still there, rotting slowly.
She had a point. Religion was like a clock for some, or like time itself, ticking out. It was reason to wake up and go to sleep at night, and Jude gave it thought, the curl of his mouth and the flitting look in his eyes thoughtful. "For people who believe, yes. But I don't think you need to believe to read it. For me it's culture, sunshine. It's a way of existing, threaded together by the stories, and the stories talk about the culture. I don't believe but I do believe in people. And I'd be struck down for heresy."
He hadn't really contemplated the dissection of the romance genre but here it was, laid out neat as ninepence among the teacups on the table. "Jane Bennet again. She's got to have her nose put thoroughly out of joint by all this dislike, she probably deserves it. I don't think people are made to be nice all the time. Imperfection is what we like about people, however nice they are. Tempers and flightiness and running away from confrontation and untidiness and inconstancy, we're bound up in people because the imperfectness makes them fit. I think we're drawn to it, rather than in spite of it."
Hester Prynne was surprising and Jude didn't hide being startled one bit. Hester Prynne and the girl sat opposite were miles and miles apart on the surface, but surface was surface and underneath was neatly hidden and he looked at her anew. "It wasn't a terribly good ending to an affair. If you're going to have one, I'm not sure I'd want to begin with those consequences. And you've no notion of my secrets, I could be Bluebeard and you wouldn't know yet."