It was the grossness of his wife, he knew, which upset them. Her weight. Well, that was one of life’s tragedies.
And it was not—for he thought of it at length—that the association with the animal prompted the comparison; no, he corrected himself, it may have, indeed, prompted it, but it was not at the core; for they looked like pigs, the men with their pink, rusty, milk-colored skins, and their necks growing out over their collars. They looked like pigs, with their short noses and their cheeks puffed out, and they were fat.
They were fat, with their bellies dropping out and down over the belt, and vast legs, and the slow way that they turned their heads; who considered themselves full of self-restraint (you saw it in their eyes), who turned their heads so slowly as he passed, to say, “Yes. I see you. And I won’t show that I judge you—though you are a fiend.”
Full of that vaunted Southern self-respect.
And there was that which was attractive in it. There was that in it he could respect, if it were not so false. So vicious.
He saw it was directed at his wife also. That they looked at her as they would at a sow. And, then, what was he?
For they could not see their lack of fastidiousness, and accounted his fastidiousness priggish or inverted—his dress, his figure; not “dapper,” as in some favored one of their own; not “trim,” not “slight,” not, if one of their own group at the Coffee Corner, “bantam,” “Banty.”
None of it. He was the invert who did what with that gross woman behind him, behind the rail, sitting and crying. Crying at any hour of the day—at this description, that assertion, from the fatigue, God knows what, from the anxiety, from shame.
At any moment. Continually, preternaturally. Weeping. As the crowd laughed at her, as if she were some animal.
How could they laugh at her? Who spoke of Southern Womanhood? They were the animals.
And he supposed it was a blessing, that she was not what they, if it went that way, would call attractive, seductive, oriental, voluptuous—for what would they not make of that, who were so interested in sex, in his sex. In his penis, in his habits. As if he were a specimen captured by savages who’d never seen a white man.