a dead house between an old woman's grim and implacable unforgiving and thepassive chafing of a youth of twenty telling himself even amid the voice maybeyou have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hatedsomebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it'sbetter then, maybe it's fine then because after forty-three years they cant anylonger surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad. And maybe it(the voice, the talking, the incredulous and unbearable amazement) had evenbeen a cry aloud once, Quentin thought, long ago when she was a girl of youngand indomitable unregret, of indictment of blind circumstance and savage event;but not now: now only the lonely thwarted old female flesh embattled forforty-three years in the old insult, the old unforgiving outraged and betrayedby the final and complete affront which was Sutpen's death: 'He wasn't agentleman. He wasn't even a gentleman. He came here with a horse and twopistols and a name which nobody ever heard before, knew for certain was his ownany more than the horse was his own or even the pistols, seeking some place tohide himself, and Yoknapatawpha County supplied him with it. He sought theguarantee of reputable men to barricade him from the other and later strangerswho might come seeking him in turn, and Jefferson gave him that. Then he neededrespectability, the shield of a virtuous woman, to make his positionimpregnable even against the men who had given him protection on thatinevitable day and hour when even they must rise against him in scorn andhorror and outrage; and it was mine and Ellen's father who gave him that. Oh, Ihold no brief for Ellen: blind romantic fool who had only youth andinexperience to excuse her even if that; blind romantic fool, then later blindwoman mother fool when she no longer had either youth or inexperience to excuseher, when she lay dying in that house for which she had exchanged pride and