Because maybe he knew now that his mother didn't know and never would know what she wanted, and so he couldn't beat her (maybe he had learned from the octoroon that you cant beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to), and he knew that all the lawyer wanted was just the money; and so if he just didn't make the mistake of believing that he could beat all of it, if he just remembered to be quiet and be alert he could beat some of it. — So he said, "All right" and let his mother pack the fine clothes and the fine linen into the bags and trunks, and maybe he lounged into the lawyer's office and watched from behind that something which could have been called smiling while the lawyer made the elbow motion about getting his horses onto the steamboat and maybe buying him an extra special body servant and arranging about the money and all; watching from behind the smiling while the lawyer did the heavy father even, talking about the scholarship, the culture, the Latin and the Greek that would equip and polish him for the position which he would hold in life and how a man to be sure could get that anywhere, in his own library even, who had the will; but how there was something, some quality to culture which only the monastic, the cloistral monotony of a — say obscure and small (though high class, high class) college — and he — ' (neither of them said ' Bon'. Never at any time did there seem to be any confusions between them as to whom Shreve meant by 'he') 'listening courteous and quiet behind that expression which you were not supposed to see past, asking at last, interrupting maybe, courteous and affable nothing of irony, nothing of sarcasm — "What did you say this college was?": and now a good deal of elbow motion here while the lawyer would shuffle through the papers to find the one from which he could read that name which he had been memorizing ever since he first talked to the mother: "The University of Mississippi, at" — Where did you say?" 'Oxford,' Quentin said. 'It's about forty miles from — '
" — Oxford."
And then the papers could be still again because he would be talking: about a small college only ten years old, about how there wouldn't be anything to distract him from his studies there (where, in a sense, wisdom herself would be a virgin or at least not very secondhand) and how he would have a chance to observe another and a provincial section of the country in which his high destiny was rooted; (granted the outcome of this war which was without doubt imminent, the successful conclusion of which we all hoped for, had no doubt of) as the man he would be and the economic power he would represent when his mother passed on, and he listening behind that expression, saying, "Then you don't recommend the law as a vocation?" and now for just a moment the lawyer would stop, but not long; maybe not long enough or perceptible enough for you to call it pause: and he would be looking at Bon too: "It hadn't occurred to me that the law might appeal to you" said Bon: "Neither did practising with a rapier appeal to me while I was doing it. But I can recall at least one occasion in my life when I was glad I had" and then the lawyer, smooth and easy: "Then by all means let it be the law. Your mother will ag — be pleased."
"All right," he said, not "good-bye"; he didn't care. Maybe he didn't even say good-bye to the octoroon, to those tears and lamentations and maybe even the clinging, the soft despairing magnolia-colored arms about his knees, and (say) three and a half feet above those boneless steel gyves that expression of his which was not smiling but just something not to be seen through. Because you cant beat them: you just flee (and thank God you can flee, can escape from that massy five-foot-thick maggot-cheesy solidarity which overlays the earth, in which men and women in couples are ranked and racked like ninepins; thanks to whatever Gods for that masculine hipless tapering peg which fits light and glib to move where the cartridge-chambered hips of women hold them fast) — not good-bye: all right: and one night he walked up the gangplank between the torches and probably only the lawyer there to see him off and this not for godspeed but to make sure that he actually took the boat.
