Light in August

You men,” she said. “It ain’t a wonder womenfolks get impatient with you. You can’t even know your own limits for devilment.

“I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it’s the good men that can’t deny the bill when it comes around.

He lives dissociated from mechanical time. Yet for that reason he has never lost it. It is as though out of his subconscious he produces without volition the few crystallizations of stated instances by which his dead life in the actual world had been governed and ordered once.

“There are secret things a man can do without being evil, Reverend. No matter how they might look to folks.”
“I don’t think that you could do anything that would be very evil, Byron, no matter how it looked to folks. But are you going to undertake to say just how far evil extends into the appearance of evil? just where between doing and appearing evil stops?”

“You don’t need my help. You are already being helped by someone stronger than I am.”
For a moment Byron does not speak. They look at one another, steadily. “Helped by who?”
“By the devil,” Hightower says.

‘It is because so much happens. Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.’

But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia

Now and then she appointed trysts beneath certain shrubs about the grounds, where he would find her naked, or with her clothing half torn to ribbons upon her, in the wild throes of nymphomania, her body gleaming in the slow shifting from one to another of such formally erotic attitudes and gestures as a Beardsley of the time of Petronius might have drawn.

During that period (it could not be called a honeymoon) Christmas watched her pass through every avatar of a woman in love.