sending it, why to him, since if she had merely wanted it told, written, andeven printed, she would not have needed to call in anybody — a woman who even inhis (Quentin's) father's youth had already established herself as the town'sand the county's poetess laureate by issuing to the stern and meagersubscription list of the county newspaper poems, ode, eulogy, and epitaph, outof some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat.

Itwould be three hours yet before he would learn why she had sent for him becausepart of it, the first part of it, Quentin already knew.

Itwas a part of his twenty years' heritage of breathing the same ai? and hearinghis father talk about the man Sutpen; a part of the town's — Jefferson's — eightyyears' heritage of the same air which the man himself had breathed between thisSeptember afternoon in 1909 and that Sunday morning in June in 1833 when hefirst rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no oneknew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing andmarried Ellen Coldfield and begot his two children — the son who widowed thedaughter who had not yet been a bride — and so accomplished his allotted courseto its violent (Miss Coldfield at least would have said, just) end.

Quentinhad grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad.His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing withsonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth.

Hewas a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts still recovering, evenforty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, wakingfrom the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself whichthey had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubbornrecalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actualregret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the