' "Dont lie to me, Thomas," Ellen said. "I can understand your bringing Henry here to see this, wanting Henry to see this; I will try to understand it; yes, I will make myself try to understand it. But not Judith, Thomas. Not my baby girl, Thomas."
' "I don't expect you to understand it," he said. "Because you are a woman.
But I didn't bring Judith down here. I would not bring her down here. I don't expect you to believe that. But I swear to it."
'"I wish I could believe you," Ellen said. "I want to believe you." Then she began to call. "Judith!" she called in a voice calm and sweet and filled with despair: "Judith honey! Time to come to bed."
'But I was not there. I was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time — once on Judith and once on the Negro girl beside her looking down through the square entrance to the loft."
It was a summer of wistaria. The twilight was full of it and of the smell of his father's cigar as they sat on the front gallery' after supper until it would be time for Quentin to start, while in the deep shaggy lawn below the veranda the fireflies blew and drifted in soft random — the odor, the scent, which five months later Mr Compson's letter would carry up from Mississippi and over the long iron New England snow and into Quentin's sitting-room at Harvard. It was a day of listening too — the listening, the hearing in 1909 mostly about that which he already knew, since he had been born in and still breathed the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833 and, on Sundays, heard even one of the original three bells in the same steeple where descendants of the same pigeons strutted and crooned or wheeled in short courses resembling soft fluid paint-smears on the soft summer sky.
That Sunday morning in June with the bells ringing peaceful and peremptory and a little cacophonous — the denominations in concord though not in tune — and the ladies and children, and house Negroes to carry the parasols and flywhisks, and even a few men (the ladies moving in hoops among the miniature broadcloth of little boys and the pantalettes of little girls, in the skirts of the time when ladies did not walk but floated) when the other men sitting with their feet on the railing of the Holston House gallery looked up, and there the stranger was. He was already halfway across the Square when they saw him, on a big hardridden roan horse, man and beast looking as though they had been created out of thin air and set down in the bright summer sabbath sunshine in the middle of a tired foxtrot face and horse that none of them had ever seen before, name that none of them had ever heard, and origin and purpose which some of them were never to learn. So that in the next four weeks (Jefferson was a village then: the Holston House, the courthouse, six stores, a blacksmith and livery stable, a saloon frequented by drovers and peddlers, three churches and perhaps thirty residences) the stranger's name went back and forth among the places of business and of idleness and among the residences in steady strophe and antistrophe: Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen. Sutpen.
