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William Faulkner
Published by Good Press, 2021
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“Yessum,” Quentin said.
“Yes,” the grim quiet voice said from beyond the unmoving triangle of dim lace; and now, among the musing and decorous wraiths Quentin seemed to watch resolving the figure of a little girl, in the prim skirts and pantalettes, the smooth prim decorous braids, of the dead time. She seemed to stand, to lurk, behind the neat picket fence of a small, grimly middleclass yard or lawn, looking out upon the whatever ogre-world of that quiet village street with that air of children born too late into their parents’ lives and doomed to contemplate all human behavior through the complex and needless follies of adults—an air Cassandralike and humorless and profoundly and sternly prophetic out of all proportion to the actual years even of a child who had never been young. “Because I was born too late. I was born twenty-two years too late—a child to whom out of the overheard talk of adults my own sister’s and my sister’s children’s faces had come to be like the faces in an ogre-tale between supper and bed long before I was old enough or big enough to be permitted to play with them, yet to whom that sister must have to turn at the last when she lay dying, with one of the children vanished and doomed to be a murderer and the other doomed to be a widow before she had even been a bride, and say, ‘Protect her, at least. At least save Judith.’ A child, yet whose child’s vouchsafed instinct could make that reply which the mature wisdom of her elders apparently could not make: ‘Protect her? From whom and from what; He has already given them life: he does not need to harm them further. It is from themselves that they need protection.’ ”
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