always in bloom ("which no winter ever quite touches"). This shows how people idealize the past, a concept also reinforced by the statement that the old men dreamed "they had danced with her and courted her." This might not be true, but Emily stars in a dream they have created about a better past.

The mood is thus nostalgic and elegiac, mourning times gone by but pointing out too how they are remembered is largely a construct of the imagination. The passage is important because it gives insights into why the town was so willing to overlook Emily's transgressions: she represented an ideal to them, a time before the Civil War disrupted an imagined Southern gentility.

After Miss Emily's death, the female cousins who had come once before come again to hold her funeral. Everyone in the town "com[es] to look" at her, the "mass of bought flowers," and her father's imposing portrait hanging above her coffin. All the ladies whisper and some "very old men" in their "brushed Confederate uniforms" speak of Miss Emily as though they had been the same age—as though they had known her well, perhaps even wooing her once upon a time. This is how much Miss Emily had been a figure who represented the past, old Southern traditional values, so much so that the old men confuse:

time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches.

Here, Faulker uses a metaphor to describe the way the past seems to these older people: like a beautiful, almost fairy-tale place where things seemed better, always, somehow, than they do now. It's as if there were no hardships then and life now is full of them. It feels untouchable because they cannot return through "the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years."

There is a real conversational/almost gossipy tone to this section of "A Rose for Emily" as women of the town, who are not of the same class as Emily, intrude into her life. "The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister,"--who is more lowly than Miss Emily's Episcopal one--to call upon Emily.  The minister does not want to get involved, but his wife writes the relatives. "We were glad because the two female cousins were even more Grierson than Miss Emily had ever been."  It seems as though the women are apprehensive about losing an Old South institution such as Miss Emily.

Yet, later the narrator remarks, "By that time it was a cabal, and we were all Miss Emily's allies to help circumvent the cousins."  Here is the fickle nature of gossips:  First they are glad that relatives have arrived to "straighten out" their cousin, then the gossips are against them. 

Once Emily begins seeing Homer Barron, a Yankee foreman for a construction crew, the townspeople begin to talk about it.  Many in the town feel it is inappropriate for her to see a) a Yankee and b) a Yankee who is a "blue-collar worker."   Homer Barron was regarded as lower on the social-class totem pole, so to speak, and it was not seen as appropriate to court someone outside of one's own social class.  

As a result of Miss Emily seeing Homer Barron, her two cousins come to visit Miss Emily to tell her that she needs to quit courting Homer Barron because it is a disgrace to the family and because of the reasons listed above.  They are unsuccessful at talking Emily out of courting him and they leave unsatisfied.