"It's Christianity which makes my father so damned clever in keeping me dependent," continued Lowe. "He's got so used to tying souls up in paper and string that he can make a neat parcel even of a bulky, bulgy soul like mine. You know how we admire shop people for the neat way they tie up parcels—we couldn't do it. Well, my father's a kind of celestial shop-keeper, and I'm the goods he's sending out—payment on delivery. Oh, damn!"
Janey's hand went up to his face and stroked it. Quentin's furies always struck her as infinitely pathetic.
"It'll be all right, dear," she whispered. "I'm sure it will. You're bound to get free."
He seized her hand and held it fiercely in his while he stared into her eyes.
"Janey—I sometimes wonder if I'll ever get free—or if I do, whether I'll find freedom the ecstasy I imagine it. Perhaps freedom, like everything else, is a mirage, a snare, a disillusion. Yesterday I was reading the Epic of Gilgamesh—
Gilgamesh, why dost thou wander around?
Life which thou seekest thou canst not find.
That's the horrible truth—nothing that we seek shall we ever find, unless it's been found over and over again already. And then there's love, Janey, that's one of the things we never find, though we seek it till our tears are blood. I've written a poem about that, comparing love to the sea—to salt water, rather, for of course hundreds of poets have compared love to the sea. Love is like the salt water that splashes round the poor sailor dying of thirst—he drinks it in his desperation, and the more he drinks the fiercer becomes his thirst, and still he drinks on in despair and hope, till at last he ends in madness—that's love. Janey, that's love."
He stooped suddenly forward, till his head was buried in her knees.