Max Harriss

The son of Mr. and Mrs. Harriss, and aged twenty-one, Max Harris is the older of their "two spoiled children [born] a year apart" (148). Gavin Stevens calls Max "the rich young earl" (192), and the son takes after the father; in a sense, the eyes have it: "the same delicate face which the sister had, but with nothing delicate about the eyes" (143). When Sebastian Gualdres beats him at everything - horses, fencing, women - that the young Yoknapatawphian thinks he has mastered, Max's resentment gives birth to a particularly original scheme for murder. After it fails, Stevens coerces him into enlisting in the army, and after Stevens marries the widowed Mrs. Harriss, Max becomes one of Steven’s "stepchildren" (238).