Unit 4: Selection Vocabulary 3

Now they have a guard outside his house with a bayonet and nobody can come to see his mother and father and sisters and his father loses his civil rights and cannot even vote.

Let everybody defend his home.

They come and make you be a soldier again. Not in the auto-ambulance, in the infantry.

"You're an orator."
"We think. We read. We are not peasants..."

"He likes it," said Passini. "We will convert him."

But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.

So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened.

Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man.

Thus she passed from generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

...and the very old men—some in their brushed Confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.