'Wait, I tell you!" Quentin said, though still he did not move nor even raise his voice — that voice with its tense suffused restrained quality: 'I am telling' Am I going to have to hear it all again he thought I am going to have to hear it all over again I am already hearing it all over again I am listening to it all over again I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever so apparently not only a man never outlives his father but not even his friends and acquaintances do — he came home and found that at least regarding which he should have needed no word nor warning even if Judith would have sent him one, sent him acknowledgement that she was beaten, who according to Mr Compson would no more have sent him acknowledgement that he had beat her than she waited (whom Miss Coldfield said was not bereaved) and met him on his return, not with the fury and despair perhaps which he might have expected even though knowing as little, having learned as little, about women as Mr Compson said he had, yet certainly with something other than the icy calm with which, according to Miss Coldfield, she met him — the kiss again after almost two years, on the brow; the voices, the speeches, quiet, contained, almost impersonal: "And — ?… Yes. Henry killed him" followed by the brief tears which ceased on the instant when they began, as if the moisture consisted of a single sheet or layer thin as a cigarette paper and in the shape of a human face; the "Ah, Clytie. Ah, Rosa. — Well, Wash. I was unable to penetrate far enough behind the Yankee lines to cut a piece from that coat tail as I promised you"; the (from Jones) guffaw, the chortle, the old imbecile stability of the articulated mud which, Mr Compson said, outlasts the victories and the defeats both: "Well, Kernel they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?": and that was all. He had returned. He was home again where his problem now was haste, passing time, the need to hurry. He was not concerned, Mr Compson said, about the courage and the will, nor even about the shrewdness now. He was not for one moment concerned about his ability to start the third time. All that he was concerned about was the possibility that he might not have time sufficient to do it in, regain his lost ground in. He did not waste any of what time he had either. The will and the shrewdness too he did not waste, though he doubtless did not consider it to have been either his will or his shrewdness which supplied waiting to his hand the opportunity, and it was probably less of shrewdness and more of courage than even will which got him engaged to Miss Rosa within a period of three months and almost before she was aware of the fact Miss Rosa, the chief disciple and advocate of that cult of demon-harrying of which he was the chief object (even though not victim), engaged to him before she had got accustomed to having him in the house, yes, more of courage than even will, yet something of shrewdness too: the shrewdness acquired in excrutiating driblets through the fifty years suddenly capitulant and retroactive or suddenly sprouting and flowering like a seed lain fallow in a vacuum or in a single iron clod. Because he seemed to perceive without stopping, in that passage through the house which was an unbroken continuation of the long journey from Virginia, the pause not to greet his family but merely to pick up Jones and drag him on out to the brier-choked fields and fallen fences and clap ax or mattock into his hands, the one weak spot, the one spot vulnerable to assault in Miss Rosa's embattled spinsterhood, and to assault and carry this in one stride, with something of the ruthless tactical skill of his old master (the Twenty-third Mississippi was in Jackson's corps at one time). And then the shrewdness failed him again. It broke down, it vanished into that old impotent logic and morality which had betrayed him before: and what day might it have been, what furrow might he have stopped dead in, on foot advanced, the unsentient plow handles in his instantaneous unsentient hands, what fence panel held in midair as though it had no weight by muscles which could not rid it, when he realized that there was more in his problem than just lack of time, that the problem contained some superdistillation of this lack: that he was now past sixty and that possibly he could get but one more son, had at best but one more son in his loins, as the old cannon might know when it has just one more shot in its corporeality.
So he suggested what he suggested to her, and she did what he should have known she would do and would have known probably if he had not bogged himself again in his morality which had all the parts but which refused to run, to move.
