The smell was believed to be the result of bad housekeeping. There is a complaint made about it. The 80-year-old mayor doesn't want to confront Emily. More complaints are made about the smell. Men from the town sneak on her property one night and spread lime around, hoping it will dissolve the body of a rodent or cat which they thought was making the smell. They see Miss Emily inside sitting by a window.
The smell goes away in a week or so. People start to feel sorry for her. They think about how she is alone, with her father dead and her sweetheart gone. They don't like her, but they are in awe of her. They want to pity her instead of being afraid of her. If they can pity her---because she is alone, because she has little money, because she has come way down in the world---then they can understand her and feel superior to her.
As we read: "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" (497).
After her father died, some ladies went to offer condolences, but she denied that he had even died. She kept his body in the house, Just as they were about to take the body by force, after three days, she broke down and they took her dead father and buried him. The town tried to explain to itself why she had kept her father's body:
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 robbed her, as people will (498).
The importance of this passage becomes clear when we discover that she acted the same way with her sweetheart that she had with her father.
After her father died, she undergoes a change. She cuts her hair, looking younger---"sort of tragic and serene" (498). Workers come to the town for a civic project. The foreman is "a big, dark, ready m...