Mrs. Gant is probably the most powerfully drawn character in the story named after her daughter, just as she is an overwhelming force in Zilphia's life, even long after she is dead.
The man who marries Zilphia is introduced as "a tramp painter," an itinerant whom her mother hires to repaint the dressmaking shop; he is described as "a young man with black hair and eyes like wood ashes" (375). Despite his own prejudice against any "woman that wore glasses" (377), he falls in love with Zilphia, and vows to her to "get you out of" the miserable life her mother forces her to live (376). Like a knight, he stands several vigils over her, but though he marries her he cannot succeed in carrying her away from Mrs. Gant.
The story covers 40 years in the life of Miss Zilphia - as the narrator and town continue to call her, although she was married at least once. Physically, she is "pole-thin, with a wan, haunted face and big, not-quite-conquered eyes" for most of her life (372), but "plump in a flabby sort of way" at others (375), sickly "from anemia and nervousness and loneliness and actual despair" (372), and beset in her "ineradicable virginity" by insomnia and dreams (379).
The story begins with Jim Gant, who in its first sentence is described as "a stock trader" (368). The next sentence explains that the stock in this case are "horses and mules," which he sells in the "Memphis markets" (368). He is the father of Miss Zilphia, though he abandons her and her mother when she was a "two-year-old girl" (369), and disappears from the narrative after he and his lover are killed not far from the Memphis markets by his wife, who tracks them down.
Throughout all the oddities of Mrs. Gant's and Zilphia's lives, the dressmaking shop continues to "do well" with the women of Jefferson who can afford to have hand-tailored clothes (378, 381). After Zilphia returns to Jefferson with a story about a second marriage and a girl she calls her daughter, "the ladies" - as the narrator calls the shop's clients - "never tired of fondling little Zilphia," as he calls the girl (381).
This "client of Mrs. Gant's" in the dressmaking shop arouses the dressmaker's wrath when she starts talking to the nine-year-old Zilphia about going to school: "You'll like it," she says, before being chased away by Mrs. Gant (372). It is presumably this woman who reports the situation to the county authorities - according to the townspeople, at least, it was "a client . . . that got Zilphia in school" (372).
This "neighbor" is awakened when Zilphia "runs out of the house in her nightdress, screaming" (380). She - although the neighbor could be a man or a woman - summons the doctor.
