an, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face" (498). Miss Emily and the foreman, Homer Barron, begin to spend time with one another. The town doesn't know what to make of this. They are glad Emily has come out of her grief, but it doesn't seem proper that she is seeing a "day laborer." She seems to keep her dignity, however, no matter what the town says or thinks about her. Then, suddenly, Faulkner mentions that she "bought the rat poison, the arsenic" (499). She bought the poison after she had been seeing Homer for a year, and during a time when two cousins were visiting her.
The passage where she goes in to buy the poison is important because it is a turning-point in her life and because Faulkner gives us a powerful description of her at this point in her mysterious life:
"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-keeper's face ought to
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