Soldiers' Pay

The air was sweet with fresh-sawed lumber and they walked through a pale yellow city of symmetrical stacked planks. a continuous line of negroes carried boards up a cleated incline like a chicken run into a freight car and flung them clashing to the floor, under the eye of an informally clad white man who reclined easily upon a lumber pile, chewing indolent tobacco. He watched them with interest as they passed, following the faint wagon road.
Chapter IV, 4

Mahon liked music; so Mrs. Worthington sent her car for them. Mrs. Worthington lived in a large, beautiful old house which her husband, conveniently dead, had bequeathed, with a colorless male cousin who had false teeth and no occupation that anyone knew of, to her. The male cousin's articulation was bad (he had been struck in the mouth with an ax in a dice game in Cuba during the Spanish-American War): perhaps this was why he did nothing.
Chapter V, 7)

Jones looked up with his customary phlegmatic calm, then he rose, lazily courteous. She watched him narrowly with the terror-sharpened cunning of an animal, but his face and manner told nothing.
Chapter VI, 1

The sentries in her blood lay down, but they lay down near the ramparts with their arms in their hands, waiting the alarm, the inevitable stand-to, and they sat clasped in the vaguely gleamed twilight of the room, Jones a fat Mirandola in a chaste Platonic nympholepsy, a religio-sentimental orgy in gray tweed, shaping an insincere, fleeting articulation of damp clay to an old imperishable desire, building himself a papier mâché Virgin: and Cecily Saunders wondering what, how much he had heard, frightened and determined.
Chapter VI, 2)

"Soldiers' Pay" was William Faulkner's first novel, written while he lived in New Orleans and published in 1926.