from the Jack Jack

Memorial Reading Throne here in the Jill Schwartz Memorial

Memorial Library in the the obscure out loud and comment on it as I go. I am your friend, your ear lover, your beguiler, your

Victorianologist and literary mansplainer in chief, Michael Ian Black.

And we are in the midst of a seduction, my friends.

An out and out seduction.

Maybe even, and I mean, and that's almost the kindest way to put it, it's almost a, it's close to an assault, it's close to a sexual assault, being perpetrated by Arabella upon her long suffering first love and ex-husband Jude Folly.

She has gotten him very drunk and she has taken him back to the pork shop, her father runs, the scene of such carnality, and she is leading

him up the stairs one by one.

One by one, stair after stair at the end of chapter six.

We are at my house dear where there's nobody to spy out how ill you are

now third stare fourth stare that's it now we shall get on and you know exactly how they are going to get on. Now Jude

is very drunk. I don't even know that he could perform his ex-husbandly duties with Arabella and the chapter has just ended I have not begun yet chapter 7

so we don't know the results of that evening but I suspect that the results are going to involve some further entrapment

of Jude's body and soul to Arabella. Now at this point in his life he really doesn't even

care. Right? He's lost everything. He's lost Sue, he's lost his faith, he has lost his children, he has nothing left. He is not even capable

of being murdered, as he said, because to murder oneself is to offer the promise of some

reward, and he has no reward.

There is nothing for him waiting on the other side

of this life or the next.

So how, how, so for the story to end right something something must happen that

invests him back into this life will that something Sue? Because that really is the only thing that he cares about.

...