Does that suit you?"
'But it's not love,' Quentin said.
'Because why not?
Because listen.
What was it the old dame, the Aunt Rosa, told you about how there are some things that just have to be whether they are or not, have to be a damn sight more than some other things that maybe are and it don't matter a damn whether they are or not?
That was it.
He just didn't have time yet.
Jesus, he must have known it would be.
Like that lawyer thought, he wasn't a fool; the trouble was, he wasn't the kind of not-fool the lawyer thought he would be.
He must have known it was going to happen.
It would be like you passed that sherbet and maybe you knew you would even reach the sideboard and the whiskey, yet you knew that tomorrow morning you would want that sherbet, then you reached the whiskey and you knew you wanted that sherbet now; maybe you didn't even go to the sideboard, maybe you even looked back at that champagne on the supper table among the dirty haviland and the crumpled damask, and all of a sudden you knew you didn't want to go back there even.
It would be no question of choosing, having to choose between the champagne or whiskey and the sherbet, but all of a sudden (it would be spring then, in that country where he had never spent a spring before and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something in the cedars like he never saw before) you find that you don't want anything but that sherbet and that you haven't been wanting anything else but that and you have been wanting that pretty hard for some time—besides knowing that that sherbet is there for you to take.
Not just for anybody to take but for you to take, knowing just from looking at that cup that it would be like a flower that, if any other hand reached for it, it would have thorns on it but not for your hand; and him not used to that since all the other cups that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine.
And more than that.
There was the knowing what he suspected might be so, or not knowing if it was so or not.
And who to say if it wasn't maybe the possibility of incest, because who (without a sister: I don't know about the others) has been in love and not discovered the vain evanescence of the fleshly encounter; who has not had to realize that when the brief all is done you must retreat from both love and pleasure, gather up your own rubbish and refuse—the hats and pants and shoes which you drag through the world—and retreat since the gods condone and practise these and the dreamy immeasurable coupling which floats oblivious above the trameling and harried instant, the: was-not: is: was: is a perquisite only of balloony and weightless elephants and whales: but maybe if there were sin too maybe you would not be permitted to escape, uncouple, return. —Aint that right?"
He ceased, he could have been interrupted easily now.
Quentin could have spoke now, but Quentin did not.
He just sat as before, his hands in his trousers pockets, his shoulders hugged inward and hunched, his face lowered and he looking somehow curiously smaller than he actually was because of his actual height and spareness—that quality of delicacy about the bones, articulation, which even at twenty still had something about it, some last echo about it, of adolescence—that is, as compared with the cherubic burliness of the other who faced him, who looked younger, whose very superiority in bulk and displacement made him look even younger, as a plump boy of twelve who outweighs the other by twenty or thirty pounds still looks younger than the boy of fourteen who had that plumpness once and lost it, sold it (whether with his consent or not) for that state of virginity which is neither boy's nor girl's.
'I don't know,' Quentin said.
'All right,' Shreve said.
'Maybe I don't either.
Only, Jesus, some day you are bound to fall in love.
They just wouldn't beat you that way.
It would be like if God had got Jesus born and saw that he had the carpenter tools and then never gave him anything to build with them.
Dont you believe that?"
'I don't know,' Quentin said.
He did not move.
Shreve looked at him.
Even while they were not talking their breaths in the tomblike air vaporized gently and quietly.
The chimes for midnight would have rung some time ago now.
'You mean, it don't matter to you?"
Quentin did not answer.
'That's right.
Dont say it.
Because I would know you are lying. —All right then.
Listen.
Because he never had to worry about the love because that would take care of itself.
Maybe he knew there was a fate, a doom on him, like what the old Aunt Rosa told you about some things that just have to be whether they are or not, just to balance the books, write Paid on the old sheet so that whoever keeps them can take it out of the ledger and burn it, get rid of it.
Maybe he knew then that whatever the old man had done, whether he meant well or ill by it, it wasn't going to be the old man who would have to pay the check; and now that the old man was bankrupt with the incompetence of age, who should do the paying if not his sons, his get, because wasn't it done that way in the old days; the old Abraham full of years and weak and incapable now of further harm, caught at last and the captains and the collectors saying,
"Old man, we don't want you" and Abraham would say,
"Praise the Lord, I have raised about me sons to bear the burden of mine iniquities and persecutions; yea, perhaps even to restore my flocks and herds from the hand of the ravisher: that I might rest mine eyes upon my goods and chattels, upon the generations of them and of my descendants increased an hundred fold as my soul goeth out from me."
He knew all the time that the love would take care of itself.
Maybe that was why he didn't have to think about her during those three months between that September and that Christmas while Henry talked about her to him, saying every time he breathed: Hers and my lives are to exist within and upon yours; did not need to waste any time over the love after it happened, backfired on him, why he never bothered to write her any letters (except that last one) which she would want to save, why he never actually proposed to her and gave her a ring for Mrs Sutpen to show around.
Because the fate was on her too: the same old Abraham. who was so old and weak now nobody would want him in the flesh on any debt; maybe he didn't even have to wait for that Christmas to see her to know this; maybe that's what it was that came out of the three months of Henry's talking that he heard without listening to: I am not hearing about a young girl, a virgin; I am hearing about a narrow delicate fenced virgin field already furrowed and bedded so that all I shall need to do is drop the seeds in, caress it smooth again, saw her that Christmas and knew it for certain and then forgot it, went back to school and did not even remember that he had forgotten it, because he did not have time then; maybe it was just one day in that spring you told about when he stopped and said, right quiet: All right.
I want to go to bed with who might be my sister.
All right and then forgot that too.
Because he didn't have time.
That is, he didn't have anything else but time, because he had to wait.
But not for her.