Winesburg, Ohio: reference groups

As a restless girl she dreamed of the stage and a life of wandering; the travelling actors laughed at her, while the men she walked with at night seemed to understand her.

Her strength fails before she can act; her son comes in and says he is going to leave town to look at people and think, and she tests him by asking if he wants to be a brisk businessman.

Believing he has killed him, the boy resolves to be a man and walks off west for good; the old man recovers and says only that God's messenger took the boy because he was too greedy for glory.

At sixteen she loved an older young man; when he left for the city to rise in the world, she offered to go with him, work, and live together unmarried.

He resolves to leave for the city and work, depressed that he is not part of the town's life, and watches a half-witted old woodcutter show off his balancing on the road.

The girl comes out and he tells her he is leaving for the city; they walk under the lamps, and he remembers the romantic notes she once hid in his books.

A quiet farm boy who walked dreamily down the middle of the road went to the big city at twenty-one to study art, planning to finish abroad, which never happened.

He takes twenty dollars from the family's hidden cash box and plans to ride a freight train to the city, lose himself among workmen, and at last have friends and not be queer.

Finding a purse with thirty-seven dollars, she insists they flee that very night to her childhood village, and on the train she talks like a delighted girl.

Up at four on an April morning with his bag packed, the young man slips past the sleeping night boy into the empty main street and looks out over the wide fields beyond town.

He takes a last walk along the road he has walked in every season; clerks ask how it feels to be going away; his father carries his bag to the train.

The doctor sits in the newspaper office telling the boy long tales about himself, admitting he wants to be admired, and the boy comes to look forward to his visits.

He curses that his wife and all women are living dead things sent to keep men from making the world worthwhile.

He admits he still loves her; after two years he found she had three lovers, sent her home silently with all his savings, wept, and was later summoned by her mother.

Recovering from a binge, the stranger sits with the father and the five-year-old girl and says tearfully that he came to be cured but is not, being a lover who has found nothing to love.

He tells the child a woman is coming whom he missed, that she may be the one, and names the quality he longs for: the strength to be loved, which men need and do not get.

In his bare room he tells how a woman neighbour began visiting him, sitting beside him saying nothing that mattered; the boy moves to sit beside him.

He says she seemed too big for the room and drove everything else away; he wanted and did not want her, and against his will told her everything that mattered to him.

The old man lives happily talking to his animals and is the source of the father's odd saying; he sits by the fire warming his feet, indifferent to what the young man says.

He says in town nobody talks to him and he cannot talk either; he screams at the old man, then admits he ran to another queer one because he is a coward, and vows to confront the reporter.

Years before, the sick hotel keeper's wife sometimes climbed to the awkward middle-aged doctor's office, ostensibly about her health, but they talked mostly of their two lives.

At forty-one, in the doctor's office, she says bitterly that she wanted marriage, not the man, and was afraid of her reputation; as she talks the doctor, falling in love, sees her grow young.

The young man longs to ask about the hands but holds back; the old man scolds him for imitating the town, urges him to dream, and describes a pastoral golden age.

At the asylum where his father died, staff feared his newspaper would expose them, and he blessed the corpse theatrically; he says he seeks the boy out to warn him not to become such a fool.

He tries to fill the boy with contempt for everyone, praising his dead brother's scorn; then a child is killed in a runaway accident on the main street and he refuses to come down.

He dictates a theory that decay is fire and the world is on fire, promises to make the boy a 'hummer', and says he should start a paper himself; that year he loses his mother, moves to the hotel, falls in love and starts a baseball club.

In the dark his voice becomes almost beautiful; he says he tells the story to warn the boy and destroy his dreams, and describes marrying and settling down in a new post.

Kneeling, he kisses her hands and begs her to dare to be loved; he leaves town soon after; that night the girl weeps that she wants to be called by the name he gave her.

She saw a spark of talent in the reporter's schoolboy writing; one summer she took him out and told him earnestly he must stop fooling with words and learn what people think, not what they say.

He loses his nerve; the young man laughs that he has already decided to marry and wants children; the older man laughs too, recalls pleasant evenings with his children, and says whatever he said would have been a lie.

On the eve of her marriage her dying father begs her not to marry anyone in town and gives her eight hundred dollars hidden in a box, making her promise never to tell her husband.

The book's central idea: people each seized a truth and tried to live by it alone, which made them grotesques and turned the truth false; the young thing inside the old man kept him from becoming one.

An old doctor whose rich young wife died within a year of marriage sits alone in his cobwebbed office, building up truths and knocking them down again.

The husband, the loyal minority-party man of the town for years, dreams of high office as the reward for his service and roars down a younger member who boasts of his own.

He is a fanatic who masters everyone around him, drives the farm to success by constant planning from his window, and is consumed by a hunger he cannot name and a fear that he will never have peace.

Sitting at his window over his land and herds, he thinks of the patriarchs of scripture and prays aloud that God will notice and speak to him too.

He prays to be made a new ruler of men and father of rulers, and pacing his room sees a new race sprung from himself, God's chosen servant on the land.

Humbled and prayerful after his success, the old man decides to make a burnt offering so that God will reveal what place the boy should take in the world and make him a man of God too.

A small man living with his silent mother is seized by ideas like fits, pouncing on bystanders and talking at them until they cannot escape.

He makes no enemies but no converts, suffers remorse that the spirit does not burn in him, dreams of power in his voice, and settles for doing well enough.

The mother shares an unspoken bond with her son; alone in his room she kneels and vows, half prayer and half demand, that even from the grave she will keep defeat from him.

Listening at his door she is happy to hear him talking to himself, a sign he is still searching; then his father steps out of the room, and what he says infuriates her.

She resolves to stab her husband with sewing scissors to save the boy; in youth she had a wild reputation, walking out with travelling men and riding through town in men's clothes.

Seized by fear and greed, he casts his neighbours as enemies of God who might rob him, and runs through the night crying to God for a son to help him seize their lands.

The old man, worn out and prematurely aged after acquiring nearly all the valley, had been bitterly disappointed until the boy came, and now feels his prayers answered.

The merchant rages at his indifferent daughters that the newcomer will leave them far behind, frightening her upstairs, then forgets it all chatting on the main street.

His admired father was killed in a street fight over a scandal and left the money squandered; the mother refuses to believe the stories and tells the boy to grow up as good a man as his father.

At sixteen he ran off with two boys on a freight car to a fair; his mother, sure he would die violently like his father, memorised stinging reproofs to deliver when he returned.

The eight hundred dollars meant to give the son his start in the city lies hidden behind the plaster at the foot of her bed, where she hid it a week after her marriage.

A nervous little old man paces the porch of his house at the edge of town while young berry pickers passing on the road jeer at him to comb hair he no longer has.

He wears one suit for ten years, stuffs scraps of thought into his pockets as paper balls, and has one friend; the narrator likens him to the gnarled apples only a few know are sweet.

The youngest son, a slight, odd scholar meant for the ministry, comes home to run the big farm, and the neighbours laugh at him and at the delicate wife he married in the city.

Silent and over-polite at his work, a job his father got him, he is watched warily by the townsmen; he bursts into a store where men are debating a horse race.

Coaching the town's baseball team, he mesmerises players on both sides and wins the town's respect; then he courts a sad, lean woman whose family is feared.

The town's telegraph operator, compared to a grotesque caged monkey, is the ugliest, dirtiest man in town, yet keeps his hands fine and is proud of having once been the best in the state.

The old man, thought a little mad, invites the boy to his room, saying he can understand if he will only listen and believe.

The awkward son of a failing store, lacing his shoes in a back shed, sees the young reporter at the printshop door and, sure he is listening to a salesman working on his father, stamps in fury.

The reporter, whom he does not know, stands in his mind for the town's judgment that condemned his family to queerness; after a year he has no friends and hates the thought.

He rants that his father and dead mother were queer, that the store is a jumble that will never sell, and that his sister knows but says nothing while he will not be stared at any longer.

The old man's restless hands, which he tries to hide, have become his fame in town because of how fast they pick berries, and they make him seem stranger still.

His refusal went unheard, but he is sure the town will learn of it and come with a rope to hang him; half doubting, he whispers that in the end he will be crucified.

Back in town late in the rain he buys a cigar and chats contentedly with another man, then stops, listening as if for a voice, and mutters that she has nothing on him and nobody knows.

The daughter born that night grew up to marry a careful banker; they are unhappy, the town blames her, and though he buys her a fine house and a servant, she is said to drink.

She flies into rages, threatens her husband with a knife, sets fire to the house, hides for days, and drives her carriage wildly through town as if to run people down, weeping on country roads.

A quiet woman of twenty-seven who has lived in town all her life works in a store and lives with her mother and a hard-drinking stepfather; beneath her calm, a ferment goes on.

The town calls him deep and expects him to break out like his father, but he has no hidden purpose and wishes he could be stirred by anything, even anger or politics.

Relieved at being spared, he forgets to mend the hole; that day he preaches that ministers too are tempted and have fallen, but God raises them up.

On a bitter January night he goes to the tower resolved to give way to sin, thinking he will leave his calling for business rather than be a hypocrite.

The town thinks her a cold old maid, but she is the most passionate soul among them and often walks half the night; her mother fears she has her wild father's nature.

The son is the wildest of three brothers, once stole and sold his father's boards and fought him in the street; he took the farm job to be near a young woman, and the town expects him to ruin her.

Carried away, the old man lays his hands on the youth's shoulders, then in horror thrusts them into his pockets and hurries off; the frightened youth decides not to ask.

She calls to a passing man to wait; he is old and deaf and shouts 'What?'; she crawls back to her room, barricades the door, and tries to face that many people live and die alone.

He says he just wants to work and keep quiet, says it is the last time they will meet; she begins to draw his face down, then pulls back and sends him to talk to his mother.

Once she made the children roar with a comic tale about a boastful artist, laughing with them, then turned cold and stern again.

The evening before, as he was leaving with a borrowed book, she took his hand and brushed his cheek with her lips, then turned harsh, saying it would be ten years before he understood her.

She lets him hold her, then stiffens and beats his face with her fists and runs; the minister bursts in raving about her; the reporter goes home to his cold bed.

He wanted her to see how important he was, locked the door and talked on; when he saw she understood, he was furious; he tells the boy to go, but the boy demands the rest.

He cursed her until she left for good, and all his imagined people left with her; the boy goes, hearing the old man whimper that he is all alone.

In a fury he thrusts the stolen money into the reporter's hand to return, beats him senseless, jumps onto the moving train, and cries proudly that he showed him he is not queer.

A clerk tramping up the stairs to dump a box breaks the moment; she leaves, trembling, and spends her last months longing for death as a lover.

Mother and son sit together in awkward silence at her window, watching a baker's endless futile feud with a cat, which the mother comes to see as a rehearsal of her own life and weeps.

He says he will go within a year or two; she longs to cry out with joy but can only repeat that he should go out among the boys, and he leaves awkwardly.

Frozen out by the daughters, she cries and is sent to her room; she fixes on the son who brings her firewood each night but cannot speak when he comes.

He never answered her notes but was flattered by them; as they walk she takes his hand, and he tells her, against his resolve, that his friend is in love with her.

Instead of speaking his feelings, he tells her solemnly that he must strike out and work; she admires him as a purposeful man, and the romance of the evening drains away.

He longs to tell them they miss the point, that a dark spot in his painting hides something from home, but he stammers and stops.

On their one evening together he took her driving, told her clumsily he wanted to marry her, kissed her into helplessness, and swore he would have her for good next time.

Facing the reporter on the cold street, he cannot speak, tells him to go back, and wanders for hours blind with anger at his failure, seeing no future for himself.

Newly confident, he has the reporter woken to meet him at the depot, but when the moment comes he can only mutter the old man's saying.

Unable to give the answer everyone would approve, the older man walks off in tears; his wife calls him home, scolding, and he feels an urge to do something wild.

For days she lay paralysed, her eyes pleading to say something about her son's future; her husband weeps; the doctor, sitting by the body, leaves awkwardly when the son comes in.

Their earlier summer walk had been awkward: he boasted he would be the biggest man in town, told her to be different from other women, and could only say at her gate that he had thought she would marry his friend.

She came to fear the pious suitor's hidden lust, became pregnant by the silent one, and found in the old doctor a man who understood without her saying a word.

The pregnancy ended in illness; she married the doctor that fall and died in spring, after a winter of him reading her his scraps of thought.

His mother, transformed, bathes and feeds him and holds him in the dark for an hour, hiding him from the searchers; he feels he would suffer the terror a thousand times for such tenderness.

They sit together for hours; the drunk boy says it taught him something, and the reporter feels drawn to him as never before, but scolds again when she is mentioned.

They were alike inside; the doctor later told his young wife that he had invented private gods to pray to, and found that this woman worshipped the same ones.

Sitting close in the dark, he feels his insignificance and, through her, a new reverence for the town's people; they hold each other, each thinking: here is this other.

She trips him and he rolls down the hill laughing; at the bottom she takes his arm in dignified silence; both have got from the evening the thing they needed.

She feels a wall stands between her and a warm inner circle of life, and becomes obsessed that one brave act would open it, fixing on the son simply because he was not unfriendly.

The narrator describes the pleasant spring countryside around the town, with quiet woodland nooks where lovers go on Sunday afternoons.

A youth lives with his mother in a once-grand stone house at the edge of town; the noisy wagons of berry pickers irritate him, and he regrets that he cannot laugh and shout like them.

On the stairs he overhears men arguing politics, and, feeling that loneliness is part of his character, watches a sullen baker in the alley.

In his long narrow room, young artists gather to talk endlessly of art; he sits in a corner saying nothing while they discuss his half-finished pictures.

Among the smells and sounds of the poor houses he feels detached from life; driven off by a dog, he stands in a vacant lot, raises his hands to the sky and mutters grand words.

Sent to town for groceries with three dollars, amid a crying child and his wife's scolding, he steps into the evening fields alive with beauty.

About to leave for the city, the young man has felt lonely all day in the fair crowds, suddenly old and set apart, wanting someone to understand what came over him after his mother's death.

The old man, a town mystery for twenty years, waits anxiously for the one young man who visits him, in whose company he grows bold and talks out the ideas of his silent years.

Unsure whether she even wants him to come, she avoids him, and after nights of listening in vain decides there is no way through the wall for her.

In the city he makes new friends and forgets her; at home her father dies, she takes a store job and saves money to follow him, sure he will return.

Through empty years in the store she dreams of their future and repeats his parting words, weeping at the counter as the fear grows that he will never come back.

Lonely, she goes alone to the lovers' woods, feels her youth has passed and that she has been cheated, and cries out that happiness will never come to her.

In his presence she talks more freely each time and leaves renewed, but alone in her room she lets her dinner go cold, remembering a lover who cried 'You dear!' over and over.

The county fair fills the town with dusty crowds; the young reporter hides in a stairway watching faces, impatient, wondering whether the girl will stay with another man all day.

Alone at night he eats bread and honey and picks up crumbs from the floor with flashing fingers, like a priest at his rosary, his hunger for the boy folded back into waiting.

Believing herself his wife, she refuses all other men, works long hours, prays her messages to him, grows attached to objects, and keeps saving long after the plan is dead.

Her mother remarries and she joins a church out of fear of loneliness, letting a middle-aged man walk her home while telling herself she is still loyal.

She touches her companion's coat in the dark and wants to ask him to sit with her but fears he would not understand; then, restless, she sends him away and lies awake demanding an answer from life.

He shuns the townsmen, drinks heavily, and hates women; a few men secretly respect his hatred, and his superior, who keeps him in the post to avoid firing him, tears up a complaint against him.

He never speaks, begins to doubt himself, locks his door, and fills his room with imaginary people to whom he can explain everything.

Back in his room he lives happily among two dozen imagined people until a woman comes into his life and drives him home to live out his days obscurely; he tells the young reporter about it.

She lays her head on the hand's shoulder, he whistles in alarm, and she throws his hat in the road and drives off; she takes the son as her lover, they marry fearing a pregnancy, and he never hears the hunger she tries to explain.

When the feared pregnancy proves false she is bitter; when her son is born she cannot decide whether she wants him, and says she would have done anything for a daughter.

Freezing and feverish in the tower, he almost hates his wife for denying him passion and vows to pursue the teacher and live for his lusts.

Feeling walled in, he lies to his wife to walk alone at night, secretly re-rents his old room, then gives her his inheritance and leaves; she, thinking him mad, remarries contentedly.

Husking corn in the autumn beauty, the older man remembers how one afternoon's wandering with a girl trapped him in marriage, mutters that life tricked him, and the young man asks whether marriage is worth it.

Running, he remembers his abandoned dreams of going west to sea or a ranch, and calls his children accidents of life; he reaches the young man dressed up and smoking on the road.

As a girl she had many lovers, always seeking some hidden wonder and the true word; she married the hotel clerk because he was at hand, thinking marriage itself must hold some secret.

She tells of a drive alone months after marrying, when her husband, smelling of paint, was fixing up the hotel and wanted money she could not bring herself to tell him about.

After a day of dazed indecision the young man bolts from his desk and runs along the dark alleys behind the stores, stumbling over the town drunkard, set on an adventure.

Brought back to town one dusk, the boy cannot bear to go home and runs off to find his grandfather, but gets lost for hours in the rain and dark until a passer-by brings him back.

She caresses a blanket shaped like a body, asking why she is left alone; one rainy night, alone in the house, she runs outside undressed with a mad urge to run through the streets.

The teacher, plain by day but lovely in the night, suddenly runs out into the storm, though a doctor has just warned her she may be losing her hearing.

He throws off his torn coat and runs across the fields shouting against his life; no promise was made, why should anyone pay, and he resolves to stop the young man before it is too late.

Doing odd jobs and loafing contentedly in cast-off coats, he is happy with little things, like sitting an hour to breathe the smell of roasting coffee; one night he decides he needs to get drunk.

She whipped the pony through a rainstorm, wanting to get out of town, marriage and her own body, then ran on foot into the dark until she fell.

Inexperienced with women and married after a courtship his wife conducted, he begins wanting to look at her again, breaks a hole in the window, and waits, but she is not there.

He discovers she reads in bed each evening and sits watching for hours, then walks the streets begging God to give him strength to mend the window.

Three times that season he creeps back to watch, telling himself each time that he will sit there without looking and that the temptation is a test he will pass.

On the stormy night she goes into the newspaper office, talks passionately about life for an hour, then says she must go or she will want to kiss him.

Sickened by an early brush with a prostitute, he had put sex out of his life; after two years in town, seeing youth courting everywhere, he falls in love with his former employer's daughter.

He lets himself think of her but keeps his thoughts pure; on a stirring spring night he walks the streets comparing her to a flame and a wind, himself to a leafless tree and a beached boat.

Sitting by the body, the son decides to leave town for the city, daydreams of the girl's lips, then is overwhelmed with shame and weeps.

The friend announces he will fall in love with the banker's daughter for a story he is writing and asks the youth to sound her out for him; the youth, irritated, goes to leave.

She runs off; he watches his mother sewing by the window and decides bitterly that love will always go to someone else, someone who talks, like his friend.

Knowing he brutalised her mother, she smears his pressing boards with mud; she walks out with the young reporter as a relief while secretly loving a bartender she thinks beneath her station.

Seeing her lover sitting miserably across the street, she happily goes out with the reporter to make him suffer, while the reporter swaggers and declares she must take him for a man.

The bartender tosses him aside three times without hitting him, tells the woman she is no good but he wants her too much, and marches her away.

Sick and reeling, he comes back to town; the young reporter takes him in, and when he babbles that he made love to the banker's daughter by the sea, the reporter angrily orders him to stop.

Home from college for the fair, she spends the day showing off a pompous instructor who begins to think of her money, while she wants to get rid of him and walk with the reporter again.

The father, a swaggering failure who thinks himself a success, tells the son to wake up and stop dreaming, since his employer has complained he acts like a gawky girl.

Emboldened by the gossip about her, he becomes pushy and without sympathy, promising nobody will know, and they walk to a berry field and sit on a pile of boards.

His friend, a young reporter who gathers trivial local news, boasts endlessly of becoming a writer and the free life it will bring.

He plays at being a solid citizen, voting, reading the paper, walking behind businessmen to look important, and proud of a political opinion he aired on a train.

In a pool room the young reporter holds forth that women must look out for themselves, eager for attention, until another youth outboasts him with a brothel story.

On the hillside he is sure she is surrendering to him; she leans on him, looking past him into the dark as if waiting; he kneels beside her, and the bartender appears.

A gaunt, sickly woman drifts through her failing family hotel doing chambermaid's work, while her spruce husband resents her ghostly presence as a reproach and curses the life he is stuck in.

The brother forbade anyone to touch the money yet bought them things; the mother loved him best; the pious younger son secretly stole a few dollars from the pile and was tormented by it.

His delicate wife, left to do a farm woman's work without help, wears herself out in a year and dies after giving birth.

Her quiet son, thought a dullard, grows up frightened of her rages, hiding his face against walls; he is happy only on visits to his grandfather's farm.

The daughter, unwanted by her hard father and born of an overworked mother, grew up a moody child hungry for love; at fifteen she goes to town to board with a merchant obsessed with education.

A motherless girl is neglected by a father obsessed with arguing his neighbours out of God; a drunken young stranger from a rich city family, come to cure his drinking, befriends the father and names the girl.

She weeps over the doctor's saying that love cannot be made definite; she recalls her motherless girlhood with a sick father who could never say what he wanted to her.

An old writer has a carpenter raise his bed to the level of the window; the carpenter, a war veteran, weeps over a brother who starved in a prison camp, and later fixes the bed his own way.

Lying in bed expecting to die suddenly, the old writer feels something young alive inside him and thinks of the many people he has known intimately.

In a waking dream the old writer sees everyone he has known pass by as grotesques; he gets up and writes a book about them that is never published.

Years earlier, under another name, the old man was a schoolmaster much loved by his boys, whose shoulders and hair he touched as he talked them into dreaming.

A half-witted pupil told his fantasies as fact; the town turned, a father beat the schoolmaster in the yard, and a mob with a rope drove him out into the rainy night.

He fled, took a name off a crate, lived with an aunt, and has worked twenty years as a day labourer, hiding his hands because he believes they were to blame.

The girl came to him pregnant; after inheriting land she had been besieged by suitors, one who talked only of virginity and one who said nothing and drew her into the dark.

The silence between them grows so awkward that the son fumbles for the door, and the mother eases his escape by telling him he should be out among the other young men.

Frightened when her son has not visited for days, the sick mother creeps along the dim hallway of the shabby hotel to his room, ashamed to be seen by the guests.

The father goes down laughing to chat with a guest; the mother, strength suddenly returned, listens at her son's door again to the sound of his pen, then goes back to her room.

Her other outlet was love affairs, ending always in sobbing repentance; now she paints her face to become a terrible beauty and descend on her husband with the scissors.

A slovenly doctor with a twitching eyelid attaches himself to the young reporter; meanwhile the paper's owner slips off each afternoon to drink and gossip about women at a saloon.

The doctor arrived drunk five years ago, has few and poor patients yet money enough, eats whatever scraps a lunch room gives him, and tells tales the boy cannot tell from lies.

He hints he may be hiding a crime, tells of a notorious murder as if he might have been involved, and begins the story of his poor mother who wanted him to be a minister.

He tells of an insane father in an asylum and a brother who worked on the railroad, came home drunk in paint-covered clothes, and piled his wages on the kitchen table.

He begs the boy to write the book he may never finish, whose idea is that everyone in the world is Christ and all are crucified.

Hiding his face from passers-by, he reaches a girl's kitchen and calls her in a hoarse whisper; she answers sulkily, then tells him to wait by a barn.

She had written him that she was his if he wanted her; by the barn he is timid and she needles him that he thinks himself better than she is.

A rambling farmhouse full of silent old relatives, hired hands, a housekeeper and a dull-witted girl is ruled by one owner and overlord, whose modern farm grew out of pioneer days.

The family came west generations ago and struggled for years against stumps, stones and standing water to clear poor wooded land.

The four elder sons worked like beasts, drank and fought on town days, and once the eldest struck his father with a whip and hid in the loft, fed by his mother, until the old man recovered.

All four elder sons were killed in the war; the mother died, and the broken father let the farm go to weeds and wandered off into the woods until the youngest son was called home.

Believing himself set apart and unable to bear becoming a clod like others, he is blind to his wife killing herself with work and dismisses his worn-out father from his mind.

The narrator describes how industrialism, newspapers and cities have since changed rural people, filling their heads with other men's words and ending their old brutal innocence.

In those days God filled men's hearts; the son saw his brothers' deaths and his father's illness as signs from God, walked the hills at night, and grew greedy for more land.

With his wife about to give birth, he walks far into his neighbours' land by moonlight, thinking it all should be his and blaming his dead brothers for not achieving more.

Years later the grandfather demands custody of the boy; the mother quietly agrees, saying bitterly that the farm that poisoned her will be good for a boy.

She hides in her room when he leaves; on the farm a great-aunt mothers him each night, and the whole silent household grows happy as if God had sent the old man a son.

He is torn between the old yearning to be a man of God and leader, softened by disappointment that his child was a daughter, and doubts that God has left the world.

He is also caught by the new greed of industrial times, invents a machine, urges his son-in-law to get rich in the coming boom, and finds the old personal God harder to feel.

The boy flourishes on the farm, loses his timidity, shouts through the silent halls, delights in morning sounds, and wonders what his mother is doing in town.

Each morning the boy counts the piglets, bangs through the house, and laughs at an old hand's same daily joke in the barnyard.

The grandfather drives the boy about the valley talking of plans and God; one afternoon his old dreams take over and he stages a ceremony that nearly destroys their bond.

Stopping in a remote wood, the grandfather leads the boy along a stream, muttering, while the boy plays, throwing a stone and calling to the animals.

Convinced that man and boy kneeling together in the wild will bring a sign from God, he drags the boy to a clearing and prays loudly.

Terrified, the boy crouches with a stick as the grandfather, face twitching, grips him and shouts at the sky for God to make himself known.

The boy runs, falls and cuts his head; the grandfather carries him to the buggy tenderly, while the boy insists a terrible man is in the woods and the old man asks God why he is not approved.

The merchant's daughters hate books; the girl had imagined town as all gaiety and free affection, and might have found some but for an early mistake.

Lonely and timid, she throws herself into her studies and shows off in class; the merchant praises her at dinner and shames his own daughters by comparison.

The narrator describes how town girls courted in closed parlours; one evening the son remarks awkwardly on how hard she works and hurries out.

She calls softly after him from her window, then creeps downstairs to find him in the orchard, but must hide under the stairs when a daughter and her suitor come into the room.

Hiding, she overhears the daughter struggling and laughing in her suitor's embrace; then she slips the son a note saying she wants someone to love and to come under her window.

Weeks later he comes to call under her window; on the drive home days before, she had burst out to a shy young farm hand that she hates everyone.

At fifteen the grandson has an adventure that sends him away forever; that year the old man, mocked by neighbours for draining a swamp, reaps a huge crop and exults.

Flush with success, the old man buys machines and gifts; the boy, nearly a man, wanders the autumn woods alone with a sling and kills a squirrel.

The boy is content to be a boy hunting imaginary game, until his grandfather, with his strained, faraway look, tells him they have something important to do.

They catch and tie an out-of-season lamb, and the boy holds it as they drive on, the old man staring past him at the sky.

At the same wood where he was frightened before, the boy trembles and plans escape, but follows, quietly untying the lamb's legs so they can run away together.

The old man builds a fire and, muttering that he must put the lamb's blood on the boy's head, walks toward him with a long knife.

The boy flees and, seeing the old man still running with the knife, hits him in the head with a stone from his sling; the old man falls and seems dead.

He announces that the creek has risen without rain, describes measuring it and puzzling over it, and triumphantly concludes it must have rained upstream.

He goes back to his rounds, then corners the young reporter, insisting he himself should have the boy's job and could do it in his odd moments.

Her father and brother are unpopular outsiders said to be dangerous; the son reportedly killed a man and once killed a dog with his stick, and the father laughs unnervingly.

The town laughs nervously at the courtship and waits for tragedy; the two menacing men wait in his hotel room while the young reporter, trembling, listens nearby.

He arrives with an armful of weeds, ignores the son's threat, and launches into an idea he wanted to explain to them and to her anyway.

He expounds how, if all crops were destroyed, people could breed new ones from wild grasses; the men laugh, and he wants to go tell her.

The reporter watches from the window as he walks off with the two men, the fierce son stooping to listen, fascinated, while he talks of milkweed and of her.

Touched, he refuses and promises to come back for her; on his last night they become lovers in a meadow and vow to stick to each other whatever happens.

He once loved a beautiful wife; he tells his story to the young reporter only after seeing the boy embracing a woman who has another suitor.

The boy, long curious, waits beside him on a pile of railroad ties, then awkwardly asks whether he was married and whether his wife is dead.

He describes his devoted early marriage: planting a garden in spring while his wife handed him seeds and laughed at the worms.

Waiting two hours in the mother's parlour, aching to forgive, he was confronted by his wife pushed in naked by her mother, who waited in the hall.

Back on the bright main street, the boy feels sick and old; the operator says he struck the mother with a chair and regrets she died before he could kill her.

The mother takes work to support them; she expects conventional tears when she scolds, but her son only looks at her steadily, and she has grown half afraid of him.

He returned and explained that he wanted to turn back but stuck it out so as not to be ashamed; she could only say she was glad and kiss him; years later he goes to visit his friend at the hotel.

He slams the door, calls his friend a fool, and sits in the station yard thinking of the girl as someone private to himself, while men load berries and joke.

He feels himself an outcast who does not belong, decides he is simply old beyond his years, and knocks awkwardly at the banker's door.

Sitting on a bench in his garden, he regrets his decision to leave and daydreams of lying with her among the humming bees in a field.

A silent, well-liked minister dreads preaching and prays each Sunday for strength; his stout wife is secretly proud as they drive about town in their carriage.

From his tower study he sees a woman next door smoking in bed with bare shoulders; shocked, he closes the window and preaches unusually well, hoping to reach her soul.

The woman is a sharp-tongued teacher who has lived abroad; he talks himself out of condemning her smoking and throws himself into sermons meant for her.

He puts the woman out of his mind and becomes attentive to his wife, putting his arm around her on a drive and kissing her at breakfast, praying to stay on the narrow path.

For weeks he is troubled and begins to blame God, asking why he, who never sought sin, should be tempted.

Near collapse, he sees the woman throw herself naked on the bed, weep, beat the pillow, and kneel to pray, looking like the child in the church window.

He smashes the window with his fist, runs to the young reporter's office, and declares that God has revealed himself in the body of a woman and he is delivered.

On a snowy day men chat about sleighing and wheat; the young reporter, with nothing to do, walks past the frozen pond and builds a fire in a beech grove to think.

He broods over his former teacher's earnest talks, suspects she loves him, rehearses confronting her aloud, then lies in his room embracing a pillow and thinking of her and of the banker's daughter.

By night the snowbound town is asleep; the lame old night watchman makes his rounds, checks the doors, and settles by the hotel stove.

The watchman plans to paint his house and dreams of retiring to breed ferrets; only the reporter, the minister in the tower and the teacher are awake.

She walks far through the snow; in the schoolroom she is cold and stern, yet sometimes, seized by happiness, she tells the children strange, intimate invented stories about dead writers.

Lying awake till four, he tries to understand what happened and mutters as he falls asleep that he has missed something she was trying to tell him.

Nothing turned out for him; always a child, he could not understand people or make them understand him, was lamed by an accident, frightened by a magistrate, and ran from a streetwalker who laughed at him.

Among his imagined people he is a bold little king; then, lonely for real flesh, he marries a fellow student, has two children, and takes a job drawing advertisements.

On a drizzly October night the young reporter wanders sadly in the rain, much as the old man does, his mood touched by his mother's illness and by thinking about himself.

A strong, dark young woman who trims hats lives with her petty, fussy father, who once made her life unbearable but has lost his power over her; he flies into week-long rages if his trouser-press boards are moved.

The bartender once inherited a farm and spent the money in six months on a wild spree of parties, mistresses and gambling, ending by smashing mirrors and windows in a rampage.

Walking alone under a new moon he forgets his companions and plays at being a drunkard and then an officer inspecting troops, scolding a tree for disorder.

Carried away, he speaks of a law of order running from little things to the stars, is amazed at his own thoughts, and feels it is better to be alone than talk like the others.

He wanders into the poor labourers' quarter, which stirs memories of stories of old-world towns, and turns into a dark alley behind the animal sheds.

Feeling all people are his kin, he heads to the young woman, sure he is now too big to be used; the bartender has just been there, lost his nerve, and threatened to break both their bones.

He creeps home sick with self-hatred, listens in vain for the voice that inspired him, and runs from the poor street that now looks squalid and commonplace.

The store sells everything and nothing, its window holding a lump of coal and six-month-old honey; the father, a former farmer, wears his greasy wedding coat every day to feel dressed up.

The father is afraid of every salesman, fearing both to refuse and to buy; a salesman flatters him into taking an exclusive agency for collar fasteners.

The son grabs a cheap revolver from the showcase and screams at the salesman to get out, that they are through being fools and queer; the salesman flees, calling him crazy.

Embarrassed, he waits for a word of understanding from his father, who only mutters his odd saying; the son strides out of town vowing he will not be queer and will show the reporter.

Miserable and cold, he walks to his boyhood farm and signals to the old half-witted hired man who stayed on there, the only person he feels he can explain himself to.

The old man tells the cows the young man is crazy and will hurt someone; that evening the young man calls the reporter outside, and the reporter goes gladly, hoping to make a friend.

Two farm hands work together: a quiet, worn man of fifty with a sharp-tongued wife and many children, and a young son of the county's notorious old reprobate.

The young man's father died drunk, whipping his horses into an oncoming train, screaming with delight; the boys of the town secretly admired his foolish courage.

The young man confesses he has got a girl in trouble and begs the older man to advise him: marry and be harnessed like a horse, or tell her to go to the devil.

A boy's tough little grandmother, who left the village as a girl and travelled widely, is ground down by deaths and debts in the city and scrubs floors with twisted hands, living with him above a junk shop.

The village has grown into a town she does not recognise; she fears it will be hard for the boy, but she finds kitchen work and he a stable job with the banker's family, slipping in unnoticed.

Though raised among gangs and brothels, the gentle boy stood in the shadow of life, loved by all and untouched; once, with his grandmother sick and no food, he stole from a shop's till.

Caught, he is glad to be ashamed because it teaches him things; in the new town he loses his stable job by forgetting his errands to stand listening among idle men.

He rents a room in an old lawyer's office; his grandmother visits, scrubs the place, and smokes a pipe with him, saying she will die when he is ready to die.

Bored by the men's talk, he buys whiskey, drinks alone on a bank outside town, and remembers mornings, rain in the barn, and the night train with his grandmother.

He explains softly that he was happy and wanted to suffer, as everyone does, without hurting anyone else, and that getting drunk was like making love and taught him things.

The narrator describes the worn, dim stairway to the doctor's barn-like office, a hallway full of a store's discarded rubbish, and a table heaped with books, bottles and a friend's apples.

She walks the office with a girlish swing and kneels by him; he takes her in his arms, kisses her and murmurs 'You lovely dear', seeing in her the young girl she once was.

Struck down before she can tell her son about the money, she begs death for another hour; when she dies, the son feels only emptiness and annoyance that he must postpone seeing a girl.

Seized by the fancy that someone young and lovely lies under the sheet, he cannot bring himself to lift it, flees, sobs that his mother is dead, and murmurs 'the lovely dear'.

The narrator describes the moment a boy first looks back on life, sees himself as a leaf blown through his town among countless lives, and wants above all to be understood by someone.

His mind turns to the banker's daughter; once he boasted to her on a country road, and now he wants to show her the change he feels in himself.

Ashamed of that evening, he finds the jostling fair crowd unbearable and stalks off, telling himself he does not care if she stays with the other man.

Near tears, he is angered by a horseman's boasting, tears his trousers on a barrel nail, and resolves to walk right into her house.

On her veranda the instructor puts on city airs and patronises the town; her mother says no one there is fit for her daughter; the girl slips inside.

She runs out calling his name and meets him coming the other way; they take hands and climb to the empty fairground grandstand above the town.

The narrator describes the empty fairground at night, full of the ghosts of the day's living crowds, where one feels both life's meaninglessness and an intense love of it.

They kiss but draw back from it; grown shy with mutual respect, they drop into rough play like young animals on the way down the hill.

A dozen people see him off and then talk of their own affairs; a woman who never noticed him says 'Good luck'; the girl runs to say goodbye but he does not see her; he counts his money, anxious not to look green.

On the train he thinks not of big things but of little scenes of his town, and when he looks up the town has disappeared into a background for his dreams.