If the Sartorises are throwbacks to the courage and recklessness of the Old South, then Horace Benbow represents the gentility of the old aristocratic society. Like the young Sartorises, Horace also goes to World War I; but while John and Bayard fought in the RAF, Horace serves in the YMCA. Young Bayard comes home with the ghost of his dead brother and a death wish; Horace comes back with a glass-blowing kit and several delicate vases. When he learns of the death of John Sartoris in the war he says, "Rotten luck they [Sartoris'] have. Funny family. Always going to wars, and always getting killed" (175). Like Bayard, Horace just seems to be going through the motions; his usefulness is also marginalized by the new South. He dutifully goes into the family law practice after his father dies, but he has no strong feeling for the law, his practice is more of a social arrangement.

He further spends his unchanging days acting a part in the new pseudo-aristocratic settings—tea and cards at the Mitchells—and he resumes an affair with the married Belle Mitchell, a woman his sister Narcissa refers to as having a "back-stairs nature." Belle, with her modern house and new cars, playing modern jazz on the piano and introducing "tea" as a formal meal, represents the new woman of the South. Narcissa represents the "unravished" pure southern lady of the old traditions. Horace leans heavily on both of them. His affair with Belle satisfies certain coarser needs, but in the end it is self-destructive to a man of his genteel nature: Belle "envelop[es] him like a rich and fatal drug, like a motionless and cloying sea in which he watched himself drown" (285). His ties to his sister, which he eventually compromises in favor of his affair with Belle, is more in line with the old southern ways. Emblematically incestuous in nature, their relationship illustrates the exclusionary caste system from which they had sprung; they were taught to keep to their own. When together, they arrogantly denounce those around them--Narcissa calls Belle "dirty" and Horace looks down upon Montgomery Ward, the Snopes who went to war with him in the service of the YMCA. They believe they are innately better than most of those around them. Narcissa, even though she despises everything about him, marries Bayard Sartoris, but Byron Snopes (who has become obsessed with her) correctly divines that she is unapproachable due to his low status; Bayard, however, is also part of the aristocratic caste, so she accepts his suit. However, when Horace marries Belle; he steps out of his introverted caste and is denounced by Narcissa and Aunt Jenny more for the lowly appearances of the match than anything else. Arguably, the members of the aristocratic caste would have preferred for the young "master" to satisfy his lustful urges out of sight, in the barn for instance, with a black slave, rather than to marry a divorced, "dirty" white woman. But that option is no longer available to Horace and so his open affair with Belle is seen as a moral "decline" by his contemporaries (especially his sister and Aunt Jenny), whereas in the past, the rape of a slave would have been considered an acceptable option.