Read "Soldiers' Pay" by William Faulkner online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Nine day or ninety day or nine hundred day sensations have a happy faculty for passing away into the oblivion whence pass sooner or later all of man's inventions. Keeps from getting the world all cluttered up. You say right off that this is God's work. But it must be a woman: no man could be so utilitarian. But then, women preserve only those things which can or might be used again. So this theory is also exploded.
After a while there were no more of the local curious to call; after a while those who had said I told you so when Miss Cecily Saunders let it be known that she would marry the parson's son and who said I told you so when she did not marry the parson's son forgot about it. There were other things to think and talk of: this was the lying-in period of the K. K. K. and the lying-out period of Mr. Wilson, a democratish gentleman living in Washington, DC.