The narrator, who does not condemn Miss Emily for her obsession with Homer, nevertheless complains that the Griersons "held themselves a little too high." But even this criticism is softened: Recalling when Miss Emily and her father rode through the town in an aristocratically disdainful manner, the narrator grudgingly admits, "We had long thought of them as a tableau" — that is, as an artistic work too refined for the common, workaday world. Also, the narrator almost perversely delights in the fact that, at age 30, Miss Emily is still single: "We were not pleased exactly, but vindicated." After Miss Emily's father's death, the narrator's ambiguous feelings are evident: "At last [we] could pity Miss Emily." The townspeople seem glad that she is a pauper; because of her new economic status, she becomes "humanized."
Moving from admiring Miss Emily as a monument to taking petty delight in her plight, the narrator again pities her, this time when she refuses to bury her father immediately after he dies: "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 had robbed her, as people will." The word "cling" prepares us for her clinging to Homer's dead body.
With the appearance of Homer, the narrator, now obviously representing the town's views, is "glad" that Miss Emily has a love interest, but this feeling quickly turns to indignation at the very idea of a Northerner presuming to be an equal of Miss Emily, a Southern, aristocratic lady. The narrator cannot imagine that she would stoop so low as "to forget noblesse oblige" and become seriously involved with a common Yankee day laborer. In other words, Miss Emily should be courteous and kind to Homer, but she should not become sexually active with him.
