Sue drew away from him and looked out into the darkness. Whatever she saw it couldn’t have been the hill, unless the train was well off course, where the gibbet of their common ancestor had stood. It wasn’t often that they did anything without the gibbet symbolically looming up behind them. So this journey at least had the merit of variety.

‘I resolved to trust you to set my wishes above your gratification,’ she reproached him. ‘Don’t be a greedy boy.’

This stultified him once more. But his response – ‘This is a queer elopement!’ – showed admirable restraint. He might have been forgiven, in the circumstances and with his history, pulling the communication cord there and then.

So might, in another version of a strikingly similar story, Florence Henniker, the apparently emancipated and promising society woman with whom, at the very time that he was writing Jude, Hardy took an abortive train trip of the heart to Winchester, and who, whatever it was she’d promised or that Hardy thought she’d promised, found herself, like Sue Bridehead, having to explain the whys and the wherefores of non-delivery in that perfect setting for disappointment, that place from which everything seems possible but nothing much happens in, a railway carriage. The metaphor of the train as an inexorable engine of non-consummation had been a favourite of Hardy’s long before he’d failed himself to run away in one with Mrs Henniker. Stephen Smith and Elfride Swancourt, fleeing Castle Boterel (the lucky blighters), have their passions rocked and cooled on the Plymouth to Paddington express some twenty years in advance – and when the trains were that much slower – of Jude and Hardy having theirs. This might seem another intriguing example of the faculty of prophecy in novelists, their uncanny knack of being able to describe in their early fiction what they are going to do in their later lives; but in fact it’s no more than rudimentary self-knowledge. One has a pretty good idea at thirteen, let alone at thirty, what sort of fool one’s going to be; one might as well get in first with the fable and steal a march on fate. That’s the only advantage over it one is ever going to enjoy.

But even if Hardy had been a dab hand at queer elopements all his life, the connection between Jude’s with Sue and his own with Florence Henniker doesn’t look fortuitous. He’s been hurt by a woman’s prevarication afresh, and Jude made to look an oaf is a reproach to Mrs Henniker, a prick, if ever there was one, to her Christian conscience; just as the sepulchral humour of the scene is a go at putting a brave face on mortification.