He stayed 2 days. He watched his sister <follow the tranquil> accomplish her tranquil hours, watched the
familiar movements of her hands and body, listened to the familiar sound of her voice; <yet> now and then
they talked of trivial things: of their childhood, of their surroundings. After that first evening she did not mention
Belle, Kinston; made no reference to any future, <other than what> yet it seemed to him that they had never
been so far asunder, not even on that night before he reached Jefferson, when she and Belle had been one
and interchangeable. It was like watching a stranger, a usurper, wearing the garments of someone known and loved.
There was no strife, antagonism, conflict. There was nothing. The gestures she made, the words she said, seemed to
have no significance. They were not spoken to him, had no relation with his past or present; he could not even
recall now what he had expected of her. He could recapture none of it, not even the <wish, the desire, let alone>
glib words, let alone the hope, the desire.

<He would think of the woman in the calico dress, of the evening he had spent there, and he would wonder if that
had changed him and that his sister was unchanged.> He wondered if <quitting <<his>> Bel> deserting Belle had
altered him unawares, had inculcated him with some quality which changed all whom he approached, una-
wares. He thought of returning to her and found that he could contemplate it without any emotion whatever, save a
faint reluctance toward the effort of overcoming a primary inertia. He thought of the woman in the calico dress, of the
evening he had spent there, wondering if perhaps that had changed him; if perhaps he had become [tainted?]
with a reality which had completely destroyed at a touch a world of illusion which he had thought was real.

<He s[illegible]ed the m[illegible] into the pa[illegible]> That lasted 2 days. In the forenoons he read or talked to Miss Jennry
or his sister, in the afternoons he rambled about with the boy and Sundy; <at ni> after supper Narcissa read
the Memphis paper aloud to Miss Jenny. Then he would go to his room, where the suitcase stayed in the locked
closet, where Little Belle's photograph was propped on a book on the table. He would stand there for a
while, looking at the soft, sweet, vague face, thinking quietly how even at 43 a man . . . . . . . . . . that incom-
prehensible conviction of mankind that respect is due that commonest phenomenon in life: an accumulation of
hours, breaths, temporarily in a single impermanent clot. Then he would go to bed, to lie in the darkness while
the scent of the garden came up from below upon the soft, dark, blowing air, not thinking of anything at all.

He seemed to have expected her to be impervious not only to marriage, but to Sartorises as well. Yet even as
the car turned into the drive that led up to the square white house on its park of locusts and oaks, entering
the atmosphere with which 4 generations of cold-blooded men clinging violently to their outworn traditions of human
behavior had imbued the very soil in which they had lived, he was saying Damn that brute. Damn that
brute. And later, pushing the mop back and forth with an awkward and ludicrous escapement of approximately
enough energy to gin a bale of cotton, he thought of his sister as a figure enchanted out of all time between a bed-
ridden old woman 89 years old who summed in her person the ultimate frustration of all the furious folly
of that race, and a 9 year old boy emerging full-fledged from the soft chiaroscuro of childhood into a
tradition that had violently slain 3 men in 4 generations while in the throes of its own rigor-mortis. He had
expected a woman to follow a man whom she had neither married nor borne into that region of truth di-
vorced from all reality which no woman is fool enough to assay; to follow the very man who had just repu-
diated that region of reality divorced from all truth which women are wise enough to accept and make liveable.