There was something curious in the way they looked at one another, curious and quiet and profoundly intent, not at all as two young men might look at each other but almost as a youth and a very young girl might out of virginity itself — a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth's immemorial obsession not with time's dragging weight which the old live with but with its fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen. 'Then he got older and got out from under the apron despite her (despite him too maybe; maybe the both of them) and he didn't even care. He found out that she was up to something and he not only didn't care, he didn't even care that he didn't know what it was; he got older and found out that she had been shaping and tempering him to be the instrument for whatever it was her hand was implacable for, maybe came to believe (or saw) that she had tricked him into receiving that shape and temper, and didn't care about that too because probably by that time he had learned that there were three things and no more: breathing, pleasure, darkness; and without money there could be no pleasure, and without pleasure it would not even be breathing but mere protoplasmic inhale and collapse of blind unorganism in a darkness where light never began.
And he had the money because he knew that she knew that the money was the only thing she could coerce and smooth him into the barrier with when Derby Day came, so she didn't dare pinch him there and she knew he knew it: so that maybe he even blackmailed her, bought her off that way: "You give me the jack as I want it and I wont ask why or what for yet." Or maybe she was so busy grooming him that she never thought of the money now, who probably never had had much time to remember it or count it or wonder how much there was in the intervals of the hating and the being mad, and so all to check him up about the money would be the lawyer. He (Bon) probably learned that the first thing: that he could go to his mother and hold the lawyer's feet to the fire anytime, like the millionaire horse has only to come in one time with a little extra sweat on him, and tomorrow he will have a new jock. Sure, that's who it would be: the lawyer, that lawyer with his private mad female millionaire to farm, who probably wasn't interested enough in the money to see whether the checks had any other writing on them when she signed them — that lawyer who, with Bon's mother already plotting and planning him since before he could remember for that day when he should be translated quick into so much rich and rotting dirt, had already been plowing and planting and harvesting him and the mother both as if he already was that lawyer who maybe had the secret drawer in the secret safe and the secret paper in it, maybe a chart with colored pins stuck into it like generals have in campaigns, and all the notations in code: Today Sutpen finished robbing a drunken Indian of a hundred miles of virgin land, val. $25,000.
At 2:31 today came up out of swamp with final plank for house. val in conj. with land 40,000.
7:52 p.m. today married. Bigamy threat val. minus nil. unless quick buyer. Not probable. Doubtless conjoined with wife same day. Say 1 year and then with maybe the date and the hour too: Son.
Intrinsic val. possible though not probable forced sale of house land plus val. crop minus child's one quarter. Emotional val. plus 100% times nil. plus val. crop. Say 10 years, one or more children.
