He was hugging himself into the bathrobe now as he had formerly hugged himself inside his pink naked almost hairless skin. 'He chose.
He chose lechery. So do I. But go on." His remark was not intended for flippancy nor even derogation.
It was born (if from any source) of that incorrigible unsentimental sentimentality of the young which takes the form of hard and often crass levity — to which, by the way, Quentin paid no attention whatever, resuming as if he had never been interrupted, his face still lowered, still brooding apparently on the open letter upon the open book between his hands.
'He left for Virginia that night.
Grandfather said how he went to the window and watched him ride across the square on the gaunt black stallion, erect in his faded gray, the hat with its broken plume cocked a little yet not quite so much as the beaver of the old days, as if (Grandfather said) even with his martial rank and prerogatives he did not quite swagger like he used to do, not because he was chastened by misfortune or spent or even war-wearied but as though even while riding he was still bemused in that state in which he struggled to hold clear and free above a maelstrom of unpredictable and unreasoning human beings, not his head for breath and not so much his fifty years of effort and striving to establish a posterity, but his code of logic and morality, his formula and recipe of fact and deduction whose balanced sum and product declined, refused to swim or even float.
Grandfather saw him approach the Holston House and saw old Mr McCaslin and two other old men hobble out and stop him, he sitting the stallion and talking to them and his voice not raised, Grandfather said, yet the very sober quality of his gestures and the set of his shoulders forensic, oratorical. Then he went on. He could still reach Sutpen's Hundred before dark, so it was probably after supper that he headed the stallion toward the Atlantic Ocean, he and Judith facing one another again for maybe a full minute, he not needing to say "I will stop it if I can," she not needing to say "Stop it then if you can" but just good-bye, the kiss on the brow and no tears; a word to Clytie and to Wash: master to slave, baron to retainer: "Well, Clytie, take care of Miss Judith. Wash, I'll send you a piece of Abe Lincoln's coat tail from Washington" and I reckon Wash answering like it used to be under the scuppernongs with the demijohn and the well bucket: "Sho, Kernel; kill ever one of the varmints!" So he ate the hoecake and drank the parched acorn coffee and rode away. Then it was '65 and the army (Grandfather had gone back to it too; he was a brigadier now though I reckon this was for more reason than because he just had one arm) had retreated across Georgia and into Carolina and they all knew it wouldn't be very much longer now.
Then one day Lee sent Johnston some reinforcements from one of his corps and Grandfather found out that the Twenty-third Mississippi was one of the regiments. And he (Grandfather) didn't know what had happened: whether Sutpen had found out in some way that Henry had at last coerced his conscience into agreeing with him as his (Henry's) father had done thirty years ago, whether Judith perhaps had written her father that she had heard from Bon at last and what she and Bon intended to do, or if the four of them had just reached as one person that point where something had to be done, had to happen, he (Grandfather) didn't know.
He just learned one morning that Sutpen had ridden up to Grandfather's old regiment's headquarters and asked and received permission to speak to Henry and did speak to him and then rode away again before midnight."
'So he got his choice made, after all,' Shreve said. 'He played that trump after all. And so he came home and found — '
'Wait,' Quentin said.
' — what he must have wanted to find or anyway what he was going to find — '
