Winesburg, Ohio
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Tom Willard was ambitious for his son. He had
always thought of himself as a successful man, al-
though nothing he had ever done had turned out
successfully. However, when he was out of sight of
the New Willard House and had no fear of coming
upon his wife, he swaggered and began to drama-
tize himself as one of the chief men of the town. He
wanted his son to succeed. He it was who had se-
cured for the boy the position on the Winesburg
Eagle. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice,
he was advising concerning some course of conduct.
"I tell you what, George, you've got to wake up,"
he said sharply. "Will Henderson has spoken to me
three times concerning the matter. He says you go
along for hours not hearing when you are spoken
to and acting like a gawky girl. What ails you?" Tom
Willard laughed good-naturedly. "Well, I guess
you'll get over it," he said. "I told Will that. You're
not a fool and you're not a woman. You're Tom
Willard's son and you'll wake up. I'm not afraid.
What you say clears things up. If being a newspaper
man had put the notion of becoming a writer into
your mind that's all right. Only I guess you'll have
to wake up to do that too, eh?"
Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and
down a flight of stairs to the office. The woman in
the darkness could hear him laughing and talking
with a guest who was striving to wear away a dull
evening by dozing in a chair by the office door. She
returned to the door of her son's room. The weak-
ness had passed from her body as by a miracle and
she stepped boldly along. A thousand ideas raced
through her head. When she heard the scraping of
a chair and the sound of a pen scratching upon
paper, she again turned and went back along the
hallway to her own room.
A definite determination had come into the mind
of the defeated wife of the Winesburg hotel keeper.
The determination was the result of long years of
quiet and rather ineffectual thinking. "Now," she
told herself, "I will act. There is something threaten-
ing my boy and I will ward it off." The fact that the
conversation between Tom Willard and his son had
been rather quiet and natural, as though an under-
standing existed between them, maddened her. Al-
though for years she had hated her husband, her
hatred had always before been a quite impersonal
thing. He had been merely a part of something else
that she hated. Now, and by the few words at the
door, he had become the thing personified. In the
darkness of her own room she clenched her fists
and glared about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on
a nail by the wall she took out a long pair of sewing
scissors and held them in her hand like a dagger. "I
will stab him," she said aloud. "He has chosen to
be the voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have
killed him something will snap within myself and I
will die also. It will be a release for all of us."
In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom
Willard, Elizabeth had borne a somewhat shaky rep-
utation in Winesburg. For years she had been what
is called "stage-struck" and had paraded through
the streets with traveling men guests at her father's
hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell
her of life in the cities out of which they had come.
Once she startled the town by putting on men's
clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street.
In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in
those days much confused. A great restlessness was
in her and it expressed itself in two ways. First there
was an uneasy desire for change, for some big defi-
nite movement to her life. It was this feeling that
had turned her mind to the stage. She dreamed of
joining some company and wandering over the
world, seeing always new faces and giving some-
thing out of herself to all people. Sometimes at night
she was quite beside herself with the thought, but
when she tried to talk of the matter to the members
of the theatrical companies that came to Winesburg
and stopped at her father's hotel, she got nowhere.
They did not seem to know what she meant, or if
she did get something of her passion expressed,
they only laughed. "It's not like that," they said.
"It's as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing
comes of it."
With the traveling men when she walked about
with them, and later with Tom Willard, it was quite
different. Always they seemed to understand and
sympathize with her. On the side streets of the vil-
lage, in the darkness under the trees, they took hold
of her hand and she thought that something unex-
pressed in herself came&n
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