How did the townspeople treat Miss Emily?

In "A Rose for Emily," the townspeople show her great
respect.  She has become a fixture that everyone is accustomed to, even in her
eccentricities. She has been around during the changing times and through several
generations.  In the "old days," she used to give china-painting lessons to the young
ladies when it was fashionable, though those days have long since passed when the
narrator tells us his story.

Years before, when Emily
refused to pay taxes, she insisted that she was granted exemption by a long-dead
dignitary (Colonel Sartoris) in town.  This is one instance where her separation from
the changing times is evident.  She is unaware that life outside the house has changed
so dramatically over the years, and so she refuses, year after year, to pay the taxes.
Whereas anyone else would probably have been forced to "pay up," Miss Emily is
not.

When representatives from the town visit to plead
their case for payment of her taxes, she puts them in their place, and they back off.  
Perhaps they do this out of respect, but also, perhaps, from a sense of fear, in that
she is so adamant.

Their regard for her place within
society is a carry-over from the "glory days" of the South, when a particularly
prominent family would be granted special favors or dispensations simply based upon
their elevated social standing.

When the smell starts to
creep out from the house, the townspeople have no clue how to proceed.  'You don't just
walk up to a lady and tell her to her face that she smells.'  Out of respect, some of
the men in town secretly get together one night and spread lime around the foundations
of the house.  Eventually, the smell does
disappear.

For many years, Miss Emily's privacy is
respected: people do not call. No one bothers her, and we sense that this is the way
she wants it. When she dies, the narrator describes her funeral:
the men come from a sense of that old-fashioned obligation described earlier, and the
women out of a morbid curiosity to see her house, a place where no one but her servant
Tobe has "trespassed" for so many years.

Perhaps her desire
to be removed from general society is now understandable.  It is only when she dies that
her secret is discovered, one that answers questions long left hanging...for those old
enough to remember the disappearance of Homer Baron, the dashing young man Emily had
been seen about town with on several occasions.  It is only then that they see not only
the "mummified" body of her old beau; if that is not enough, on the pillow next to his
head is a long grey hair, indicating that this woman--perceived by the townspeople as a
pillar of the community--has been...sleeping next to a dead body...and
recently, based on the color of the
hair...