Self-Talk in A Rose for Emily - Essay Example

Self-Talk in "A Rose for Emily" This paper analyzes the novel, "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, in the perspective of intrapersonal communication. It begins with a discussion of intrapersonal communication as a theory and then relates its elements to the novel. Intrapersonal communication (IaC) as a theory Cunningham (1997) made a comprehensive review of Intrapersonal communication (IaC) as a theory and according to her, this theory seems to be unreasonable, being way out of the normal forms of communication models. Usually, “communication” refers to an interchange of messages between persons, but in IaC, the message comes from a source and is received by the same source. What results is a model of communication wherein the message is conveyed within itself. Specifically, IaC is characterized as being made by an unknown source. As such, it is equivalent to self talk (Cunningham 1997). Interpreted as talking to oneself, Hood (2002) said this form of communication is useful for coping, in the same way that Cunningham (1997) looks at it as persuading oneself of something, or as attempts at interpreting the experience of self to oneself. Since the message is just a cipher or “nothing” according to Cunningham (1997), in terms of communication elements, the source is at the same time the receiver, or the stimuli is at the same time the receptor, hence there is no normal transfer. Cunningham (1997) then describes IaC as circular since the sender, receiver, and transmitter of the message, is one and the same. This is the reason Cunningham (1997) looks at intrapersonal communication theory with reservation. Nevertheless, there are some positive functions noted for intrapersonal communication. For example, it can be used for problem solving as well as decision-making, as self-talk is therapeutic in stressful situations (Hood 2002). IaC, however, tends to portray how the source-receiver thinks about situations and this is expressed as the individual goes though his self-talk. (Hood 2002). Looking at Intrapersonal communication as self-talk, Christine Cauchon (1994) also said it serves a very important purpose, being a means of self-regulation. As utilized in the novel, “We” vocalizes a private speech, like mumbling a reminder to self. Self-talk, aside from being a reminder, according to Cauchon (1994), can be used as preparation, or as going through the process itself as a relieving experience. She, therefore, agrees with Hood (2002) and in some aspects of Cunningham’s (1997) except that the theory is not questioned. The most apt explanation of IaC, if applied on the novel, A Rose for Emily, is given by Honeycutt‌ and Ford‌ (2001) who termed intrapersonal communication as “imagined interactions” (IIs). Accordingly, for varied reasons, the talker is imagining conversations with important others. The use of “We” in narrations is a good example as used in that novel. IIs, according to Honeycutt‌ and Ford‌ (2001), are forms of daydreaming which kind of interactions play important roles in managing conflict, understanding of the self, maintaining relations, catharsis, rehearsal and compensation. IaC in A Rose for Emily Sender of the message in first person. Throughout the novel, “We,” the narrator, maintains a pervading presence from the beginning to the end. We starts the story from its reporter-witness-source self: “WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral” (Faulkner 2007, Chap.1). It goes through the process of narrating, using the pronouns, we and our, in the first person plural form and could be said to stand for the whole of the town. “We,” as narrator, is clearly telling of a societal experience, as it continues describing the townspeople with a common concern and moving as one at the opening of the story when Miss Emily died – WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years (Faulkner 2007, Chap. 1) Role of Iac. The receiving and transmitting of the message in IaC is best understood when the role of IaC is to be seen as performing the role of conflict management (Cunningham 1997, Cauchon 1994, Hood 2002). Here, the communication is said to perform specifically the need for self-understanding and maintaining relations, as life is difficult enough to manage. It is for this part that the “Marking Time” research of Howard and Hollander (1993) comes in handy. In shaping interpretations of social life, they said, time is a crucial factor but as seen in the novel, Miss Emily is said not to be able to distinguish differences in time – which is why she refuses to pay her taxes and doesn’t see the need to bury her dead. As such, norms are broken and the town is concerned. When norms are broken. What is evident in the novel is that these broken norms, therefore broken relationships, have something to do with Miss Emily’s refusal to relate with the community in terms of not recognizing her tax obligations, and secondly, her keeping her dead – against health regulations. These are not expected of responsible citizens which attitude provides fodder to community chatter. As a form of catharsis, therefore, We self-talks probably for emotional release and to understand self. Why is Miss Emily like that? The opening paragraph already provides the reader a window to a community concern that was way out of the ordinary and needing to be discussed and understood. Maintaining relations. In talking about the death of Miss Emily’s father, the narrator said that Emily met the ladies who called at her home with “no trace of grief on her face,” said that her father was not dead, and refused to have her father buried. In here, the narrator feels the need to go back to history to understand Miss Emily. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will (Faulkner 2007, Chap.2) Rehearsal and Compensation. The following discourses reflect the personality of a gossipy town, at the same time serves to rehearse the thoughts of a people where concern is familial. According to the novel, the construction company in the town had taken in Negroes and one of them was Homer Baron which people hoped would catch the fancy of Miss Emily. At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer…." And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose its really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could….” (Faulkner 2007, Chap.3) The same solicitous attitude is shown throughout, following Miss Emily, to her death – perhaps because of the way she had been conducting herself. The town thought they owed it to Miss Emily to take care of her concerns. When she bought arsenic, the people went ahead and thought. “So THE NEXT day we all said, ‘She will kill herself;’ and we said it would be the best thing” (Faulkner 2007, Chap.4). Conclusion As Chittenden (2007) described, the first person technique in communication can allow a reader to feel very close to a specific characters point of view. The problem is that this perspective is limited for the reader. Another problem that arises when communicating with this viewpoint is that it is difficult to let the reader know what the character looks like. In the novel, the reader has to trust in “We” as speaking for the community, and bear with this narrator to prove trustworthiness in relating the story. The narrator has to be relied upon as all-knowing. How, for example, did the narrator know that Miss Emily bought arsenic? Perhaps from gossip? Accordingly, if the character is describing himself or herself, a self-deprecating attitude is best. In the novel, the “We” character does not attempt to let the reader be endeared to its persona and tried its best to be level headed. Hence, the reader does not feel that Ms. Emily is an underdog of an oppressive society out to gossip about her. “Imagined interactions” as Honeycutt‌ and Ford‌ (2001) would term the monologues of “We,” seem to serve the hard to forgive and forget functions of the past and process for the community some healing. Miss Emily is a unique character mirroring the kind of society that she is part of. She is one for whom time never changes life – as the community embodied in “We” also never learns to forget – even through time. Miss Emily stayed alone most of time. Such situation, far removed from society would not do much to make her sane. She had her moments of hard to forgive and forget situations as in hopelessly waiting for Homer to marry her, only to find out that this is impossible as Homer is inclined to like young men more. The things that Miss Emily preferred to do are community issues. As the community waited long for her burial, they also rushed in to look into the door unopened for many years. There, they found her, keeping another dead. “We” relates the events in its need to understand self and to interpret events and to find out its position in the whole thing. As the conscience of the community, “We” struggles to rehearse the fibers of what went before – although for the meantime, things appear to be meaningless. Relating the story is a form of catharsis and some compensation that at least some of the troubles have ended – such as not anymore having the need to make Miss Emily pay her taxes, and eradicating the smell of death wherein Miss Emily would rather keep her dead. Intrapersonal communication has an important function – at least for the self – in its need to untangle the threads of complicated life. As employed in the novel, “We” self-talks in its process of managing a relational conflict. Works Cited Cauchon, Christine. “Whistlers mutter.” Self-Talk. Psychology Today. 1 Sept. 1994 http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=35005 Chittenden, Meg. “Viewpoint in the Novel - First Person.” 20 Nov 2007 Cunningham, Stanley. Intrapersonal communication: A Review and Critique. In Aitken, Joan and Loenard J. Shedletsky (Eds.) Intrapersonal communication processes. Plymouth, Hayden-McNeil, 1997. Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily. Oct.1, 2007 http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.html Faulkner. William. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. ISBN-10: 0679764038. ISBN-13: 978-0679764038. Vintage. Oct. 31, 1995. Honeycutt‌, James M. and Sherry G. Ford‌. “Mental Imagery and Intrapersonal Communication: A Review of Research on Imagined.” Interactions (IIs) and Current Developments. In: Gudykunst, William B. Communication Yearbook 25. International Communication Association. Vol. 25, No. 1, p. 315-345. doi:10.1207/s15567419cy2501_9. 2001. Hood, Colleen Deyell "Coping skills theory as an underlying framework for therapeutic recreation services.” Therapeutic Recreation Journal. Second Quarter 2002. FindArticles.com. 24 Nov. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3903/is_200204/ai_n9032958 Howard, Judith A. and Jocelyn A. Hollander. “Marking Time.” Sociological Inquiry. Sociological Inquiry 63 (4), 425–443. doi:10.1111/j.1475-682X.1993.tb00322.x. October 1993 Appendix A: The Novel A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner Source: http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.html I WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years. It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emilys house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emilys father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it. When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction. On the first of the year they mailed her a tax notice. February came, and there was no reply. They wrote her a formal letter, asking her to call at the sheriffs office at her convenience. A week later the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send his car for her, and received in reply a note on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink, to the effect that she no longer went out at all. The tax notice was also enclosed, without comment. They called a special meeting of the Board of Aldermen. A deputation waited upon her, knocked at the door through which no visitor had passed since she ceased giving china-painting lessons eight or ten years earlier. They were admitted by the old Negro into a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow. It smelled of dust and disuse--a close, dank smell. The Negro led them into the parlor. It was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture. When the Negro opened the blinds of one window, they could see that the leather was cracked; and when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. On a tarnished gilt easel before the fireplace stood a crayon portrait of Miss Emilys father. They rose when she entered--a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand. She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain. Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves." "But we have. We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didnt you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?" "I received a paper, yes," Miss Emily said. "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson." "But there is nothing on the books to show that, you see We must go by the--" "See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson." "But, Miss Emily--" "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out." II So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. That was two years after her fathers death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her. After her fathers death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all. A few of the ladies had the temerity to call, but were not received, and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man--a young man then--going in and out with a market basket. "Just as if a man--any man--could keep a kitchen properly, "the ladies said; so they were not surprised when the smell developed. It was another link between the gross, teeming world and the high and mighty Griersons. A neighbor, a woman, complained to the mayor, Judge Stevens, eighty years old. "But what will you have me do about it, madam?" he said. "Why, send her word to stop it," the woman said. "Isnt there a law? " "Im sure that wont be necessary," Judge Stevens said. "Its probably just a snake or a rat that nigger of hers killed in the yard. Ill speak to him about it." The next day he received two more complaints, one from a man who came in diffident deprecation. "We really must do something about it, Judge. Id be the last one in the world to bother Miss Emily, but weve got to do something." That night the Board of Aldermen met--three graybeards and one younger man, a member of the rising generation. "Its simple enough," he said. "Send her word to have her place cleaned up. Give her a certain time to do it in, and if she dont. .." "Dammit, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emilys lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol. They crept quietly across the lawn and into the shadow of the locusts that lined the street. After a week or two the smell went away. That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldnt have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized. When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad. At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less. The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will. III SHE WAS SICK for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows--sort of tragic and serene. The town had just let the contracts for paving the sidewalks, and in the summer after her fathers death they began the work. The construction company came with riggers and mules and machinery, and a foreman named Homer Barron, a Yankee--a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face. The little boys would follow in groups to hear him cuss the riggers, and the riggers singing in time to the rise and fall of picks. Pretty soon he knew everybody in town. Whenever you heard a lot of laughing anywhere about the square, Homer Barron would be in the center of the group. Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable. At first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest, because the ladies all said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." But there were still others, older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige- - without calling it noblesse oblige. They just said, "Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her." She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral. And as soon as the old people said, "Poor Emily," the whispering began. "Do you suppose its really so?" they said to one another. "Of course it is. What else could . . ." This behind their hands; rustling of craned silk and satin behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon as the thin, swift clop-clop-clop of the matched team passed: "Poor Emily." She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness. Like when she bought the rat poison, the arsenic. That was over a year after they had begun to say "Poor Emily," and while the two female cousins were visiting her. "I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eyesockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keepers face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said. "Yes, Miss Emily. What kind? For rats and such? Id recom--" "I want the best you have. I dont care what kind." The druggist named several. "Theyll kill anything up to an elephant. But what you want is--" "Arsenic," Miss Emily said. "Is that a good one?" "Is . . . arsenic? Yes, maam. But what you want--" "I want arsenic." The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. "Why, of course," the druggist said. "If thats what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for." Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up. The Negro delivery boy brought her the package; the druggist didnt come back. When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: "For rats." IV So THE NEXT day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." Then we said, "She will persuade him yet," because Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks Club--that he was not a marrying man. Later we said, "Poor Emily" behind the jalousies as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove. Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister--Miss Emilys people were Episcopal-- to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the ministers wife wrote to Miss Emilys relations in Alabama. So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened. Then we were sure that they were to be married. We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jewelers and ordered a mans toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later we learned that she had bought a complete outfit of mens clothing, including a nightshirt, and we said, "They are married." We were really glad. We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been. So we were not surprised when Homer Barron--the streets had been finished some time since--was gone. We were a little disappointed that there was not a public blowing-off, but we believed that he had gone on to prepare for Miss Emilys coming, or to give her a chance to get rid of the cousins. (By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emilys allies to help circumvent the cousins.) Sure enough, after another week they departed. And, as we had expected all along, within three days Homer Barron was back in town. A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time. The Negro man went in and out with the market basket, but the front door remained closed. Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did that night when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her womans life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die. When we next saw Miss Emily, she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray. During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray, when it ceased turning. Up to the day of her death at seventy-four it was still that vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man. From that time on her front door remained closed, save for a period of six or seven years, when she was about forty, during which she gave lessons in china-painting. She fitted up a studio in one of the downstairs rooms, where the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris contemporaries were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays with a twenty-five-cent piece for the collection plate. Meanwhile her taxes had been remitted. Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies magazines. The front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good. When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them. Daily, monthly, yearly we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows--she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house--like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse. And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her. We did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse. She died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight. V THE NEGRO met the first of the ladies at the front door and let them in, with their hushed, sibilant voices and their quick, curious glances, and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again. The two female cousins came at once. They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; 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. Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it. The violence of breaking down the door seemed to fill this room with pervading dust. A thin, acrid pall as of the tomb seemed to lie everywhere upon this room decked and furnished as for a bridal: upon the valance curtains of faded rose color, upon the rose-shaded lights, upon the dressing table, upon the delicate array of crystal and the mans toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured. Among them lay a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed, which, lifted, left upon the surface a pale crescent in the dust. Upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks. The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair. Read More