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TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/winesburg/claude/REFERENCE.html
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5.5 3a4758172d story-to-pack: add the corpora and the catalogue v2/v3
Fourteen corpora split and classified: aesop, bierce, chekhov, holmes,
keefe, lawson, lorimer, maupassant, nobody, plaintales, poe, torchy,
wallingford and winesburg, each with its splitter and the hand-written
groups and pages; catalogue v2 and v3; and the shared splitters
gutenberg_chunks.py, se_split.py and se_build.py.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_019rwKTmug58sEsJ72AuWsEi
2026-10-07 06:05:51 -04:00

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<h1>Winesburg, Ohio: reference groups</h1>
<p class="meta">Sherwood Anderson, 1919 (Standard Ebooks text). 24 stories, 284 scenes cut by the same rule as <code>chunk.py</code>.
Summaries, predicaments, groups and options written by Claude by reading every scene: no local inference.
A comparison baseline, not a pack. Option moves give a direction only, never a number.</p>
<section><h2>G01 · Whether to leave for somewhere bigger</h2>
<p class="pred">You feel you do not belong where you grew up, somewhere bigger is calling, and the people here are tied to you.</p>
<p class="meta">A young person wants a life of their own from the people who would be left behind. · 11 scenes from 8 stories
(Mother, Terror, Adventure, The Thinker, Loneliness, “Queer”, Drink, Departure) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell them plainly you are going, even if you cannot say why. <span class='src'>from scene 30</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.family risk</code> <code>flags.leaving set</code></li><li>Slip away at night without a word. <span class='src'>from scene 223</span><br><code>relationships.family -</code> <code>money risk</code> <code>flags.left_home set</code></li><li>Offer to give everything up and go with the one who is leaving. <span class='src'>from scene 112</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Stay, and keep your head down at your work. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.family +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Take a last walk through the old places before you go. <span class='src'>from scene 281</span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>relationships.community +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>28</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A restless young woman longs for a larger life elsewhere, and only the men who court her seem to understand the longing.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>30</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A young man tells his mother he must leave home to find himself, without knowing where or why, and she tests him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>99</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A young person who believes he has done something terrible leaves home for good to make his own way in the world.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s messenger took the boy because he was too greedy for glory.</p></details><details><summary><b>112</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A young woman whose sweetheart is leaving to make his way in the wider world offers to give up everything and follow him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>143</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man who feels no part of the life around him resolves to leave for somewhere bigger and simply work.</summary><p class="sum">He resolves to leave for the city and work, depressed that he is not part of the town&#x27;s life, and watches a half-witted old woodcutter show off his balancing on the road.</p></details><details><summary><b>145</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man tells a girl who once admired him that he is leaving for good, and asks her to walk with him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>182</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A dreamy young man leaves his small beginnings to develop his gift somewhere bigger, planning grand next steps that never come.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>223</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man convinced he can never belong where he is decides to slip away to somewhere nobody will know him.</summary><p class="sum">He takes twenty dollars from the family&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>237</b> · <i>Drink</i> — An old woman who stumbles on a little money seizes the chance to flee back to the home of her childhood at once.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>280</b> · <i>Departure</i> — A young man about to leave home for good rises before dawn, unable to sleep, wondering what he will find.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>281</b> · <i>Departure</i> — A young man about to leave takes one last walk through the familiar places of his youth, and neighbours ask how it feels.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G02 · Telling it all to the one who will listen</h2>
<p class="pred">You have carried something unsaid for years, and at last there is one person willing to sit and hear it.</p>
<p class="meta">A lonely person wants to be heard and believed from the one willing listener. · 11 scenes from 6 stories
(The Philosopher, Respectability, Tandy, Loneliness, “Queer”, Death) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Tell it all, the worst part too. <span class='src'>from scene 256</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.confidant +</code> <code>flags.confessed set</code></li><li>Tell it as a warning, not a plea. <span class='src'>from scene 128 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.confidant risk</code></li><li>Stop halfway and send them away. <span class='src'>from scene 195 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.confidant -</code> <code>flags.kept_silent set</code></li><li>Pour it out to someone who cannot judge you. <span class='src'>from scene 218</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>insight -</code></li><li>Ask only that they believe you. <span class='src'>from scene 192 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.confidant +</code> <code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>33</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A lonely older man pours out tales of himself to a young listener, openly admitting he wants to be admired.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>127</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A man betrayed long ago pours out a hatred of everyone like the one who hurt him to a startled young listener.</summary><p class="sum">He curses that his wife and all women are living dead things sent to keep men from making the world worthwhile.</p></details><details><summary><b>130</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A man who discovers betrayal says nothing, gives away everything he has, and still aches to forgive.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>152</b> · <i>Tandy</i> — A man who fled his old life to cure a weakness admits to strangers that he has failed, and why.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>153</b> · <i>Tandy</i> — A ruined man pours out his deepest longing to a small child, the only listener who will not laugh.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>193</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A lonely old man tells a young listener how someone once began quietly entering his solitary life.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>194</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man who has lived alone wants someone and fears her at once, and cannot stop himself opening up to her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>218</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A troubled young man pours his heart out to someone happy and simple who barely listens.</summary><p class="sum">The old man lives happily talking to his animals and is the source of the father&#x27;s odd saying; he sits by the fire warming his feet, indifferent to what the young man says.</p></details><details><summary><b>220</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man admits he fled to someone as odd as himself because he is too frightened to face anyone who matters.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>250</b> · <i>Death</i> — A worn-out wife visits someone on the pretext of a practical errand, but really to talk about her life.</summary><p class="sum">Years before, the sick hotel keeper&#x27;s wife sometimes climbed to the awkward middle-aged doctor&#x27;s office, ostensibly about her health, but they talked mostly of their two lives.</p></details><details><summary><b>256</b> · <i>Death</i> — A tired woman pours out the story of her wasted life to the one person who listens, and he begins to love her.</summary><p class="sum">At forty-one, in the doctor&#x27;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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G03 · An elder presses their hard lesson on you</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone older, marked by their own failures, keeps urging on you the lesson they learned, and wants you to live by it.</p>
<p class="meta">A young person wants to find their own way from an elder with a lesson. · 9 scenes from 8 stories
(Hands, The Philosopher, A Man of Ideas, Respectability, Tandy, The Teacher, The Untold Lie, Death) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Take it to heart and let it change your plans. <span class='src'>from scene 154</span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>relationships.elder +</code></li><li>Listen politely and forget it by morning. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.elder -</code></li><li>Ask them the question you really want answered. <span class='src'>from scene 126 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.elder risk</code></li><li>Refuse the lesson and do what you had planned. <span class='src'>from scene 256 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.elder -</code> <code>flags.ignored_advice set</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>7</b> · <i>Hands</i> — An older friend urges a young man to stop imitating the people around him and to trust his own dreams instead.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>38</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A man who has made a fool of himself all his life seeks out a younger version of himself to warn him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>39</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A bitter older man tries to teach a young one that despising everyone is the way to rise above them.</summary><p class="sum">He tries to fill the boy with contempt for everyone, praising his dead brother&#x27;s scorn; then a child is killed in a runaway accident on the main street and he refuses to come down.</p></details><details><summary><b>104</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — A man full of ideas nobody asked for presses them on a young beginner, promising to make him a success.</summary><p class="sum">He dictates a theory that decay is fire and the world is on fire, promises to make the boy a &#x27;hummer&#x27;, 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.</p></details><details><summary><b>128</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A disillusioned man tells his story to a young one precisely to destroy the dreams the young one still holds.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>154</b> · <i>Tandy</i> — A child given a vision of who she might become by a passing stranger clings to it against her indifferent parent.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>177</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A mentor who sees real promise in a young person urges them earnestly to stop playing and learn what life is really about.</summary><p class="sum">She saw a spark of talent in the reporter&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>235</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A man who rushed to urge a friend to flee commitment finds the friend has chosen it, and admits his advice was a lie.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>255</b> · <i>Death</i> — A dying parent gives a child secret savings as a way out, begging her not to throw her life away where she is.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G04 · One idea has taken over your life</h2>
<p class="pred">One idea or hope has grown until it runs your whole life, and the people around you are paying for it.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a ruling idea wants to see it fulfilled from the people it uses up. · 9 scenes from 7 stories
(The Book of the Grotesque, Paper Pills, Mother, Godliness, Terror, A Man of Ideas, The Strength of God) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Double down: this time it will come true. <span class='src'>from scene 95</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.family -</code> <code>flags.obsessed set</code></li><li>Tear it down and start building it again. <span class='src'>from scene 13</span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>money -</code></li><li>Press it on the next person who will listen. <span class='src'>from scene 100</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.community -</code></li><li>Settle for doing well enough. <span class='src'>from scene 156</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>insight +</code></li><li>Notice who it is costing, and stop. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.family +</code> <code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>3</b> · <i>The Book of the Grotesque</i> — A thinker sees that clinging to one idea as the whole truth warps a person, and feels that danger in himself.</summary><p class="sum">The book&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>13</b> · <i>Paper Pills</i> — A widower withdrawn into one dusty corner spends his days building ideas and tearing them down, forgotten by everyone.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>19</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A man who has waited years for his loyalty to be rewarded explodes when a younger newcomer boasts of his own service.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>53</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A driven young man masters everyone around him and makes his holdings prosper, yet is eaten by a hunger he cannot name.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>55</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man who has everything he worked for longs for some greater power to single him out and confirm he matters.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>56</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An ambitious man persuades himself that his desire to rule over others and found a dynasty is a holy calling.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s chosen servant on the land.</p></details><details><summary><b>95</b> · <i>Terror</i> — An older relative plans a dramatic ritual to learn his grandchild&#x27;s destiny, certain it is for the child&#x27;s own good.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>100</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — A man overtaken by sudden enthusiasms corners anyone nearby and talks at them until they cannot get away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>156</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man who has done his work decently for years secretly longs for a greatness he suspects he will never have.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G05 · Your child&#x27;s chances are the life you never had</h2>
<p class="pred">Your own chances are gone, and you have fixed every hope on a child who does not know what you want of them.</p>
<p class="meta">A parent wants the child to live the life they missed from their child. · 9 scenes from 5 stories
(Mother, Godliness, Surrender, The Thinker, Death) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Press them hard to wake up and get ahead. <span class='src'>from scene 25 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.child -</code></li><li>Hold up the one they ought to become. <span class='src'>from scene 134</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.child risk</code></li><li>Put money aside for them in secret. <span class='src'>from scene 265</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>flags.secret_savings set</code></li><li>Rehearse a scolding, then say nothing when they come. <span class='src'>from scene 137 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.child +</code> <code>voice -</code></li><li>Tell them your own story, and let them choose. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.child +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>20</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A mother whose own hopes died long ago vows that her son will live out the life she never got to live.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>24</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A mother eavesdropping on her son overhears the father she despises shaping the young man toward the life she hates.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>27</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A long-defeated wife decides that the only way to save her son from her husband&#x27;s influence is a violent act.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s clothes.</p></details><details><summary><b>60</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man consumed by fear of losing what he has begs heaven for a son who will help him take even more.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>68</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man who gained almost everything he schemed for was bitterly disappointed until a grandchild seemed to fulfil his hopes.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>81</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A parent who rages at his own children over their lack of ambition forgets the whole matter the moment he is outside.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>134</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A widow insists to her son that his father was a good man, whatever people whisper, and holds him up as the model.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>136</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A parent terrified that a child will repeat the other parent&#x27;s fate rehearses a furious scolding for his return.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>265</b> · <i>Death</i> — The secret savings a mother kept for years as her way out lie hidden, and the child they were meant for never knows.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G06 · The one everyone watches</h2>
<p class="pred">Everyone around you has decided you are the odd one, and they watch you, half amused and half afraid.</p>
<p class="meta">A the odd one wants to be taken as ordinary from the watching community. · 10 scenes from 7 stories
(Hands, Paper Pills, Godliness, A Man of Ideas, Respectability, Loneliness, “Queer”) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Win them over with the one thing you do well. <span class='src'>from scene 105</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.community +</code></li><li>Keep to yourself and let them talk. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>relationships.community -</code></li><li>Lash out at the next one who stares. <span class='src'>from scene 214 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>standing -</code> <code>flags.lashed_out set</code></li><li>Go where nobody knows you. <span class='src'>from scene 223 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.community -</code> <code>flags.left_home set</code></li><li>Carry on as you are and let them laugh. <span class='src'>from scene 102 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.community +</code> <code>standing -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>4</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A timid old man living alone on the edge of things is mocked by passing young people as he paces back and forth.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>14</b> · <i>Paper Pills</i> — An eccentric old man with a single friend is passed over by everyone, though a rare sweetness lies hidden inside him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>51</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — The family&#x27;s odd one, who went away to study, is called home to fill the place of stronger brothers, and neighbours laugh.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>101</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — Everyone around the odd man watches warily for his next outburst, amused and ready to slip away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>105</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — An odd man finally earns everyone&#x27;s respect for one gift, then risks it by courting someone everyone fears.</summary><p class="sum">Coaching the town&#x27;s baseball team, he mesmerises players on both sides and wins the town&#x27;s respect; then he courts a sad, lean woman whose family is feared.</p></details><details><summary><b>123</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A man fallen to an obscure post, repellent to everyone, still takes quiet pride in the one skill he has left.</summary><p class="sum">The town&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>192</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — An old man everyone thinks half mad chooses one young person to hear his story, asking only to be believed.</summary><p class="sum">The old man, thought a little mad, invites the boy to his room, saying he can understand if he will only listen and believe.</p></details><details><summary><b>211</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A self-conscious young man is sure that a passer-by who stands for everyone else is listening and laughing at his family.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>216</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A friendless young man picks one confident person to stand for the whole community&#x27;s judgment, and wants to strike at it.</summary><p class="sum">The reporter, whom he does not know, stands in his mind for the town&#x27;s judgment that condemned his family to queerness; after a year he has no friends and hates the thought.</p></details><details><summary><b>219</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man ashamed of his parents&#x27; oddness rails that he alone sees how everyone looks at them.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G07 · What they say about you is not who you are</h2>
<p class="pred">People have settled on a story about you, admiring or damning, and it has almost nothing to do with who you are inside.</p>
<p class="meta">A person with a reputation wants to be known truly from the people who talk. · 11 scenes from 9 stories
(Hands, The Philosopher, Nobody Knows, Godliness, Adventure, The Thinker, The Strength of God, The Teacher, The Untold Lie) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Live up to the story they tell. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.false_front set</code></li><li>Confess in general terms, and see who understands. <span class='src'>from scene 160</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Give up your place rather than go on pretending. <span class='src'>from scene 165</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>flags.dropped_front set</code></li><li>Hide the part they would not understand. <span class='src'>from scene 6</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.secret_kept set</code></li><li>Prove them wrong by what you choose next. <span class='src'>from scene 235 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.community +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>6</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A man is known for a trait he is ashamed of, and everyone admires it without ever asking why he hides it.</summary><p class="sum">The old man&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>40</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A man who refused to help in an emergency is convinced the whole community will turn on him and destroy him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>46</b> · <i>Nobody Knows</i> — A young man walks home from a secret encounter, pleased with himself, while half fearing someone knows.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>61</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An unhappy wife is blamed by everyone around her for a marriage no amount of her husband&#x27;s money can mend.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>62</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A woman whose inner misery no one understands lashes out wildly, and everyone around her trades stories about her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>111</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A quiet woman who has never left home seems placid to everyone, while inside her a restless longing never stops.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>139</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man everyone thinks deep and full of purpose knows he is only empty, and wishes something would stir him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>160</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man spared from acting on a secret temptation confesses in general terms, in public, that he too is tempted.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>165</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A respected man decides he would rather give up his position and give in openly than go on living as a hypocrite.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>176</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A woman everyone thinks cold and dried up is in fact the most passionate person among them, and nobody suspects it.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s nature.</p></details><details><summary><b>228</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A young man with a bad reputation courts someone, and everyone is sure he will ruin her.</summary><p class="sum">The son is the wildest of three brothers, once stole and sold his father&#x27;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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G08 · Reaching out, then pulling back</h2>
<p class="pred">You have finally reached out to someone who matters, and at the moment of closeness something in you recoils.</p>
<p class="meta">A lonely person wants closeness without losing themselves from the one they reached for. · 10 scenes from 7 stories
(Hands, Adventure, The Thinker, The Teacher, Loneliness, “Queer”, Death) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Run, and say nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 8</span><br><code>relationships.beloved -</code> <code>flags.fled_closeness set</code></li><li>Turn harsh to hide what you felt. <span class='src'>from scene 178</span><br><code>voice -</code> <code>relationships.beloved risk</code></li><li>Drive them off before they know you too well. <span class='src'>from scene 196</span><br><code>relationships.beloved -</code> <code>insight -</code></li><li>Let the moment pass and part kindly. <span class='src'>from scene 149</span><br><code>relationships.beloved +</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Stay, and let them see you. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.beloved +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>8</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A lonely man reaches out to touch the young friend he cherishes, then recoils in terror and runs from him.</summary><p class="sum">Carried away, the old man lays his hands on the youth&#x27;s shoulders, then in horror thrusts them into his pockets and hurries off; the frightened youth decides not to ask.</p></details><details><summary><b>122</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A woman who reached out wildly to a stranger retreats in shame and tries to accept that she may always be alone.</summary><p class="sum">She calls to a passing man to wait; he is old and deaf and shouts &#x27;What?&#x27;; she crawls back to her room, barricades the door, and tries to face that many people live and die alone.</p></details><details><summary><b>149</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — Two young people reach the edge of a real moment of affection, and one of them pulls back just in time.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>175</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A reserved woman lets her guard down to laugh with those in her charge, then abruptly turns cold again.</summary><p class="sum">Once she made the children roar with a comic tale about a boastful artist, laughing with them, then turned cold and stern again.</p></details><details><summary><b>178</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A mentor&#x27;s earnest wish to be understood by a young person slips into tenderness, and she covers it with harshness.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>180</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A young man embraced and then struck by an older woman is left furious and baffled about what she wanted.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>195</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man desperate to be understood realises he has been, and the thought of being truly known terrifies him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>196</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man drives away the one person who understood him, and loses his private comforts along with her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>225</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man unable to say what he means strikes out at the one who came to listen, and leaves proud of it.</summary><p class="sum">In a fury he thrusts the stolen money into the reporter&#x27;s hand to return, beats him senseless, jumps onto the moving train, and cries proudly that he showed him he is not queer.</p></details><details><summary><b>260</b> · <i>Death</i> — A moment of connection two lonely people waited years for is broken by a trivial noise, and never comes again.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G09 · The thing you cannot get out</h2>
<p class="pred">There is something you badly need to say to someone in front of you, and when the moment comes the words will not come.</p>
<p class="meta">A tongue-tied person wants to say what they mean from the one who needs to hear it. · 12 scenes from 9 stories
(Mother, Surrender, The Thinker, Loneliness, An Awakening, “Queer”, The Untold Lie, Death, Sophistication) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Fall back on the usual polite words. <span class='src'>from scene 31</span><br><code>relationships.close -</code></li><li>Say something else instead. <span class='src'>from scene 146</span><br><code>relationships.close risk</code> <code>insight +</code></li><li>Send them away and walk it off alone. <span class='src'>from scene 222</span><br><code>relationships.close -</code> <code>flags.kept_silent set</code></li><li>Write it down and leave it for them to find. <span class='src'>from scene 86 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.close risk</code></li><li>Boast instead, to fill the silence. <span class='src'>from scene 271</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.close -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>21</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A sick mother and her grown son sit together each evening, loving each other and unable to say a single real thing.</summary><p class="sum">Mother and son sit together in awkward silence at her window, watching a baker&#x27;s endless futile feud with a cat, which the mother comes to see as a rehearsal of her own life and weeps.</p></details><details><summary><b>31</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A mother hears the words she has prayed for from her son and cannot show him any of the joy she feels.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>82</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A lonely young woman shut out by the household fixes on the one person who is kind, and cannot say a word to him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>146</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man holding the hand of the girl he cares for tells her instead about his friend&#x27;s feelings for her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>148</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man trying to impress the girl he likes talks only of his plans, and the moment of closeness drains away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>185</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A young man knows exactly what he wants to say about his own work, and cannot get a single word of it out.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>200</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A plain-spoken man who cannot find words for his feelings shows them by force, and swears he will have her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>222</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man who has worked himself up to speak his mind freezes at the moment and sends the other person away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>224</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man about to leave for good wants to say one important thing before he goes, and cannot find the words.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s saying.</p></details><details><summary><b>231</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — An older man knows the answer everyone expects him to give, and cannot bring himself to say it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>262</b> · <i>Death</i> — A dying mother struggles for days to tell her son something about his future, and dies unable to speak.</summary><p class="sum">For days she lay paralysed, her eyes pleading to say something about her son&#x27;s future; her husband weeps; the doctor, sitting by the body, leaves awkwardly when the son comes in.</p></details><details><summary><b>271</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A tongue-tied young man tries to impress the girl he likes with boasts, and ends the evening saying nothing he meant.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G10 · Understood without a word</h2>
<p class="pred">For once someone understands you without your having to explain, and you do not know what to do with it.</p>
<p class="meta">A person understood at last wants to keep the moment from the one who understands. · 7 scenes from 5 stories
(Paper Pills, Godliness, Drink, Death, Sophistication) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Hold still and say nothing. <span class='src'>from scene 277</span><br><code>relationships.confidant +</code> <code>insight +</code></li><li>Stay close to them for good, whatever anyone thinks. <span class='src'>from scene 17</span><br><code>relationships.confidant +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Reach for more than the moment offers. <span class='src'>from scene 259 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.confidant risk</code> <code>flags.crossed_line set</code></li><li>Break the spell with play. <span class='src'>from scene 278 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.confidant +</code></li><li>Hide it from everyone, so nobody can break it. <span class='src'>from scene 65</span><br><code>relationships.family +</code> <code>relationships.community -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>16</b> · <i>Paper Pills</i> — A frightened young woman in trouble finds an older man who understands her without a word, and never wants to leave.</summary><p class="sum">She came to fear the pious suitor&#x27;s hidden lust, became pregnant by the silent one, and found in the old doctor a man who understood without her saying a word.</p></details><details><summary><b>17</b> · <i>Paper Pills</i> — A young woman chooses an odd older man over ordinary suitors, and they share a brief private happiness before she dies.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>65</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child who ran away finds that his cold, angry parent has suddenly become tender, and wants to keep that moment forever.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>247</b> · <i>Drink</i> — Two young rivals for the same person are thrown together for a night and feel an unexpected closeness.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>251</b> · <i>Death</i> — Two lonely people discover they share the same private hopes, and are glad simply not to be alone in them.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>277</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — Two lonely young people sit close in silence and feel, for once, truly understood without a word being said.</summary><p class="sum">Sitting close in the dark, he feels his insignificance and, through her, a new reverence for the town&#x27;s people; they hold each other, each thinking: here is this other.</p></details><details><summary><b>279</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A silent evening between two young people gives each what they needed, though neither could explain it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G11 · On the edge of everyone else&#x27;s life</h2>
<p class="pred">Everyone around you seems to belong, laughing and pairing off and talking easily, and you stand at the edge unable to join.</p>
<p class="meta">A onlooker wants to belong from the crowd. · 8 scenes from 7 stories
(Surrender, Adventure, The Thinker, Loneliness, An Awakening, The Untold Lie, Sophistication) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Join in, however awkwardly. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>relationships.community +</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Slip away to be alone and think. <span class='src'>from scene 272 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>relationships.community -</code></li><li>Go and find the one person you want. <span class='src'>from scene 273 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.beloved risk</code></li><li>Tell yourself you are simply older than they are. <span class='src'>from scene 144 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.community -</code></li><li>Stay where you are and watch. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>insight +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>83</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young woman who feels walled off from the warmth others share becomes convinced one brave act will let her in.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>117</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — In spring the quiet places on the outskirts fill with couples, a pleasure open to everyone who has someone.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes the pleasant spring countryside around the town, with quiet woodland nooks where lovers go on Sunday afternoons.</p></details><details><summary><b>133</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A reserved young man watches others laugh and joke together, and wishes he could join in as easily as they do.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>138</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man overhearing others argue passionately about nothing feels that loneliness is simply part of who he is.</summary><p class="sum">On the stairs he overhears men arguing politics, and, feeling that loneliness is part of his character, watches a sullen baker in the alley.</p></details><details><summary><b>184</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A shy young man sits silent in a corner while clever talkers pick over his work, missing everything he meant by it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>205</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man, briefly exalted, feels both apart from everyone around him and grander than ever before.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>232</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A man sent on a dull errand by a scolding spouse steps outside and is overwhelmed by the beauty he has no time for.</summary><p class="sum">Sent to town for groceries with three dollars, amid a crying child and his wife&#x27;s scolding, he steps into the evening fields alive with beauty.</p></details><details><summary><b>267</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A young man about to leave home feels suddenly older than his years, and wants one person to understand the change.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s death.</p></details></section><section><h2>G12 · Waiting for someone who may never come</h2>
<p class="pred">You have waited a long time for someone to come back or come to you, and cannot tell whether to keep on.</p>
<p class="meta">A one who waits wants the absent one to come from the absent one. · 7 scenes from 5 stories
(Hands, Surrender, Adventure, Death, Sophistication) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Keep faith, and keep waiting. <span class='src'>from scene 115 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.absent +</code> <code>flags.keeping_faith set</code></li><li>Save up and go after them. <span class='src'>from scene 114</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.absent risk</code></li><li>Say aloud that it is not coming. <span class='src'>from scene 118</span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>flags.gave_up_waiting set</code></li><li>Let someone else walk with you, just once. <span class='src'>from scene 119 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.community +</code> <code>relationships.absent -</code></li><li>Put it out of your mind and get on with things. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.absent -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>5</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A fearful recluse waits for the one young friend in whose company he dares to speak his long-held thoughts aloud.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>87</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young woman who has declared herself hears nothing back and decides she will never break out of her isolation.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>114</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A young woman left behind keeps faith and saves to follow a sweetheart who has already forgotten her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>116</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A woman waiting years for someone to return feels the fear grow that he never will, and cannot stop waiting.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>118</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A lonely woman admits aloud for the first time that the happiness she has waited years for is never going to come.</summary><p class="sum">Lonely, she goes alone to the lovers&#x27; woods, feels her youth has passed and that she has been cheated, and cries out that happiness will never come to her.</p></details><details><summary><b>252</b> · <i>Death</i> — A woman comes away from her one true friend feeling young again, then sinks back alone into memories of lost chances.</summary><p class="sum">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 &#x27;You dear!&#x27; over and over.</p></details><details><summary><b>266</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A restless young man waits in the crowd for a chance to see one particular person, fearing he has waited for nothing.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G13 · Alone so long your habits have become your company</h2>
<p class="pred">You have lived shut away so long that private habits and imaginings have begun to replace the people you once needed.</p>
<p class="meta">A recluse wants company without risk from the people outside. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(Hands, Adventure, Respectability, Loneliness) · stage <b>low</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Invent the company you cannot find. <span class='src'>from scene 186</span><br><code>insight -</code> <code>relationships.community -</code> <code>flags.withdrawn set</code></li><li>Make one cautious effort to be among people. <span class='src'>from scene 119</span><br><code>relationships.community +</code> <code>standing +</code></li><li>Nurse your scorn and keep them all away. <span class='src'>from scene 124</span><br><code>relationships.community -</code> <code>standing risk</code></li><li>Keep to your small habits; they are enough. <span class='src'>from scene 12</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.community -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>12</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A lonely man ends another evening alone, his longing for his one friend folded back into habit and waiting.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>115</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A woman holding faith with an absent lover shuts out everyone else and lets small lonely habits take over her life.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>119</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A woman frightened by her own isolation makes a cautious effort to be among people again, while clinging to an old loyalty.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>120</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A lonely woman wants company but not the particular person who offers it, and cannot explain what she wants.</summary><p class="sum">She touches her companion&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>124</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A bitter man who scorns everyone is quietly admired by those who share a resentment they dare not voice.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>186</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man who cannot make real people understand him shuts them out and invents companions who always understand.</summary><p class="sum">He never speaks, begins to doubt himself, locks his door, and fills his room with imaginary people to whom he can explain everything.</p></details><details><summary><b>190</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man living contentedly in his own private world is about to be driven out of it by one real person.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G14 · The life you settled into</h2>
<p class="pred">You settled into a marriage or a life because it was at hand, and years later it feels like a harness you cannot slip.</p>
<p class="meta">A person who settled wants to be free, or at peace from their partner and household. · 8 scenes from 5 stories
(Surrender, The Strength of God, Loneliness, The Untold Lie, Death) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Walk out, and leave them provided for. <span class='src'>from scene 189</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code> <code>flags.walked_out set</code></li><li>Blame your partner for everything you missed. <span class='src'>from scene 166</span><br><code>relationships.spouse -</code></li><li>Keep a secret way out and tell no one. <span class='src'>from scene 257</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code> <code>flags.secret_savings set</code></li><li>Remember the good evenings, and stay. <span class='src'>from scene 235 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.spouse +</code> <code>relationships.family +</code></li><li>Try again to explain what you really wanted. <span class='src'>from scene 89</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.spouse risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>89</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young woman who wanted to be understood gets a lover and a hasty marriage instead, and her partner never listens.</summary><p class="sum">She lays her head on the hand&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>90</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young mother trapped by a marriage she did not want cannot decide whether she even wants the child she has.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>166</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man waiting to give in to temptation blames his spouse for everything he has missed and vows to throw off all restraint.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>189</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man who feels smothered by family life slips away in secret, then abandons it altogether for his old solitude.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>229</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A man who feels life tricked him into marriage is asked by a younger man whether settling down is worth it.</summary><p class="sum">Husking corn in the autumn beauty, the older man remembers how one afternoon&#x27;s wandering with a girl trapped him in marriage, mutters that life tricked him, and the young man asks whether marriage is worth it.</p></details><details><summary><b>234</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A man remembers all the adventures he gave up for family, and wonders whether they were ever really his choice.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>254</b> · <i>Death</i> — A restless young woman marries whoever is at hand, believing marriage itself will give her life the meaning she seeks.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>257</b> · <i>Death</i> — A young wife holds a secret that could help her spouse, and cannot bring herself to share it because she does not love him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G15 · The urge to break out, now</h2>
<p class="pred">An urge you cannot explain seizes you to run out into the night and do something wild, and it will not wait.</p>
<p class="meta">A restless person wants release from everything that holds them. · 7 scenes from 7 stories
(Nobody Knows, Godliness, Adventure, The Teacher, The Untold Lie, Drink, Death) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Go, and see where it takes you. <span class='src'>from scene 42</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.broke_out set</code></li><li>Run until you drop, then go home. <span class='src'>from scene 258</span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code></li><li>Call out to the first person you meet. <span class='src'>from scene 122 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.community risk</code></li><li>Get drunk once, on purpose, to learn what it is like. <span class='src'>from scene 242</span><br><code>money -</code> <code>insight +</code> <code>flags.drunk_once set</code></li><li>Go to the one person who might understand. <span class='src'>from scene 179 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.confidant +</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>42</b> · <i>Nobody Knows</i> — A young man who has spent all day unable to decide suddenly bolts into the night to do something he fears.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>64</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child who cannot face going home runs away into the dark and becomes lost and terrified before he is found.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>121</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — A woman starved of love is swept by a wild impulse to break every rule and reach out to anyone at all.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>173</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A woman driven by a feeling she cannot contain rushes out into a storm, heedless of a warning about her health.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>233</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A man who gave up his freedom long ago suddenly rebels and races to stop a younger man making the same choice.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>242</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A contented young man who asks almost nothing from life decides, for once, he must do something out of character.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>258</b> · <i>Death</i> — A young wife trapped in her new life flees wildly into a storm, wanting to escape everything and find something.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G16 · A desire at war with who you mean to be</h2>
<p class="pred">A desire you are ashamed of keeps pulling at you, and each time you give in you tell yourself you are testing your strength.</p>
<p class="meta">A person of good standing wants to stay who they mean to be from the one they desire. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(The Strength of God, The Teacher, Drink, Death) · stage <b>high</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Close the gap tomorrow, and mean it. <span class='src'>from scene 162</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>flags.resisted set</code></li><li>Go back, telling yourself it is only a test. <span class='src'>from scene 164</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>flags.temptation set</code></li><li>Keep the thought, but keep it pure. <span class='src'>from scene 244</span><br><code>insight +</code></li><li>Turn to your partner instead. <span class='src'>from scene 161 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>relationships.spouse +</code></li><li>Give in, and stop pretending. <span class='src'>from scene 165 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.spouse -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>159</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man who never let himself think of anyone but his spouse finds himself arranging, in secret, to watch another person.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>162</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man who cannot stop watching someone in secret begs for the strength to do the one simple thing that would end it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>164</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man keeps returning to his secret temptation, each time telling himself he is only testing his own strength.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>179</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A lonely woman trying to open a young person&#x27;s eyes to life feels her passion to teach turn into longing to be loved.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>243</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A young man who shut desire out of his life after an ugly experience finds himself falling in love anyway.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s daughter.</p></details><details><summary><b>244</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A young man in love from afar keeps his feelings to himself and pours them into private words on a spring night.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>263</b> · <i>Death</i> — A young man keeping vigil by a dead parent catches himself thinking only of his own future and desires, and is ashamed.</summary><p class="sum">Sitting by the body, the son decides to leave town for the city, daydreams of the girl&#x27;s lips, then is overwhelmed with shame and weeps.</p></details></section><section><h2>G17 · Someone else wants the one you want</h2>
<p class="pred">Someone else wants the person you care for, and nobody has said plainly which of you they want.</p>
<p class="meta">A suitor wants the person they care for from a rival. · 7 scenes from 4 stories
(The Thinker, An Awakening, Drink, Sophistication) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Refuse to carry the rival&#x27;s message, and go yourself. <span class='src'>from scene 142 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Walk out with the other one to make them jealous. <span class='src'>from scene 207</span><br><code>relationships.beloved risk</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Threaten the rival. <span class='src'>from scene 206 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.rival -</code></li><li>Forbid the other to speak of them that way. <span class='src'>from scene 246</span><br><code>relationships.rival -</code> <code>relationships.beloved +</code></li><li>Decide it will always be someone else, and step aside. <span class='src'>from scene 150</span><br><code>standing -</code> <code>relationships.beloved -</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>141</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A friend asks a quiet young man to carry his declaration of love to the girl the quiet one secretly cares for.</summary><p class="sum">The friend announces he will fall in love with the banker&#x27;s daughter for a story he is writing and asks the youth to sound her out for him; the youth, irritated, goes to leave.</p></details><details><summary><b>150</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A silent young man concludes bitterly that love will always go to someone else, someone who talks more easily.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>198</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young woman secretly loves someone she thinks beneath her, and keeps company with a safer admirer to ease the longing.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>207</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young woman uses an eager admirer to make the one she really wants jealous, while the admirer thinks he has won her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>209</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man is humiliated in front of a woman by a stronger rival who does not even bother to fight him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>246</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A young man who secretly loves someone flares up when another admirer speaks of her in a way he cannot bear.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s daughter by the sea, the reporter angrily orders him to stop.</p></details><details><summary><b>270</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A young woman back from the wider world parades an impressive escort for show while wishing she were with someone else.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G18 · Acting bigger than you feel</h2>
<p class="pred">You want someone to see you as bigger and surer than you feel, so you talk and act a part you do not believe.</p>
<p class="meta">A person out to impress wants to be taken seriously from the ones they want to impress. · 6 scenes from 5 stories
(Mother, Nobody Knows, The Thinker, Loneliness, An Awakening) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Boast of the great things you will do. <span class='src'>from scene 140</span><br><code>standing risk</code> <code>relationships.friend -</code></li><li>Talk worldly, like the others. <span class='src'>from scene 201</span><br><code>relationships.peers +</code> <code>insight -</code></li><li>Play the solid citizen. <span class='src'>from scene 188</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>money +</code></li><li>Drop the act and say you are not sure. <span class='src'>filled gap</span><br><code>voice +</code> <code>standing -</code></li><li>Say little, and let them draw their own conclusions. <span class='src'>archetype</span><br><code>standing risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>25</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A father who counts himself a success despite every failure presses his dreamy son to wake up and get ahead.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>45</b> · <i>Nobody Knows</i> — A young man emboldened by gossip about a girl presses her, with no feeling for her, promising that nobody will know.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>140</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A talkative young man boasts to a quiet friend about the easy, glorious life he will have once he makes his name.</summary><p class="sum">His friend, a young reporter who gathers trivial local news, boasts endlessly of becoming a writer and the free life it will bring.</p></details><details><summary><b>188</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A dreamer tries on the part of the solid, respectable citizen and is proud of himself for a while.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>201</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man shows off among his peers with worldly talk he does not believe, until someone louder outdoes him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>208</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man sure of his conquest does not see that the woman with him is waiting for somebody else.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section><section><h2>G19 · Unseen at home</h2>
<p class="pred">The person at home who should notice you is wrapped up in their own concerns, and you have stopped expecting to be seen.</p>
<p class="meta">A overlooked family member wants to be noticed and loved from the one at home who does not see them. · 7 scenes from 6 stories
(Mother, The Philosopher, Godliness, Surrender, Tandy, Death) · stage <b>middle</b></p>
<h3>Options</h3><ol><li>Hide and wait for it to pass. <span class='src'>from scene 63</span><br><code>relationships.family -</code></li><li>Work harder, until someone notices. <span class='src'>from scene 52</span><br><code>standing +</code> <code>relationships.family risk</code></li><li>Take a little of what is withheld from you, in secret. <span class='src'>from scene 37</span><br><code>money +</code> <code>flags.stole set</code></li><li>Leave, hoping for warmth elsewhere. <span class='src'>from scene 78</span><br><code>relationships.family -</code> <code>flags.left_home set</code></li><li>Take up the new name a stranger offers you. <span class='src'>from scene 154 <span class="warn">(outside this group)</span></span><br><code>insight +</code> <code>relationships.family risk</code></li></ol>
<h3>Scenes</h3><details><summary><b>18</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A man who has failed at everything he began resents his worn-out wife as the living reminder of his defeat.</summary><p class="sum">A gaunt, sickly woman drifts through her failing family hotel doing chambermaid&#x27;s work, while her spruce husband resents her ghostly presence as a reproach and curses the life he is stuck in.</p></details><details><summary><b>37</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A dutiful son watches his mother favour a cruel brother, and secretly steals from that brother while praying for hours.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>52</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A delicate young wife works herself to death in her husband&#x27;s household while he, absorbed in his plans, never notices.</summary><p class="sum">His delicate wife, left to do a farm woman&#x27;s work without help, wears herself out in a year and dies after giving birth.</p></details><details><summary><b>63</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A quiet child growing up amid a parent&#x27;s rages learns to hide, and is happy only when he is sent away.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s farm.</p></details><details><summary><b>78</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — An unloved young woman leaves a cold home to board with another family, hoping at last to find warmth.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>151</b> · <i>Tandy</i> — A child is half forgotten by a parent so absorbed in winning arguments that he never notices her at all.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>253</b> · <i>Death</i> — A daughter grows up with a parent who wants to speak to her about her life and only ever complains about his own.</summary><p class="sum">She weeps over the doctor&#x27;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.</p></details></section>
<section><h2>Unassigned (121)</h2><p class="meta">Scenes that fit no situation recurring in three or more stories.</p><details><summary><b>0</b> · <i>The Book of the Grotesque</i> — An old man asks for help with a small task, and the helper&#x27;s old grief takes over the visit and the plan.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>1</b> · <i>The Book of the Grotesque</i> — An old man who expects to die any night lies awake feeling something young and unspent still alive inside him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>2</b> · <i>The Book of the Grotesque</i> — An old man sees everyone he ever knew as twisted and strange, and feels he must set them down before he dies.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>9</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A gentle mentor shows his care for the young people in his charge through touch, and they begin to share his dreams.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>10</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A gentle man is falsely accused by a confused youth, and the whole community turns violently against him overnight.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>11</b> · <i>Hands</i> — A man driven out by a false accusation starts over under a new name, blaming himself and hiding what he was.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>15</b> · <i>Paper Pills</i> — A young woman with an inheritance is pursued by many suitors who all want the same thing, one hiding it behind pious talk.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>22</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A mother and son who cannot talk to each other end every visit with the same polite excuse to part.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>23</b> · <i>Mother</i> — An ailing mother, ashamed of how she looks, creeps out in secret to reassure herself that her son is still all right.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>26</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A weak, bitter woman is roused to sudden strength by the threat she sees to her son&#x27;s future.</summary><p class="sum">The father goes down laughing to chat with a guest; the mother, strength suddenly returned, listens at her son&#x27;s door again to the sound of his pen, then goes back to her room.</p></details><details><summary><b>29</b> · <i>Mother</i> — A woman worn down by years resolves to make herself once more the striking figure she was, for one final confrontation.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>32</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A strange older man attaches himself to a young newcomer, choosing the hours when the young man&#x27;s superior is away.</summary><p class="sum">A slovenly doctor with a twitching eyelid attaches himself to the young reporter; meanwhile the paper&#x27;s owner slips off each afternoon to drink and gossip about women at a saloon.</p></details><details><summary><b>34</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A newcomer with a murky past and unexplained money lives shabbily among them, and nobody can tell his truths from his lies.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>35</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A man teases his young listener with hints of a hidden crime, half daring him to dig into the past.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>36</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A man tells the story of a harsh brother who flaunted his wages at home while their mother toiled to keep them.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>41</b> · <i>The Philosopher</i> — A frightened man begs a young listener to carry on the one idea he fears he will not live to set down.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>43</b> · <i>Nobody Knows</i> — A nervous young man calls out a girl with a reputation, and she pretends she never invited him.</summary><p class="sum">Hiding his face from passers-by, he reaches a girl&#x27;s kitchen and calls her in a hoarse whisper; she answers sulkily, then tells him to wait by a barn.</p></details><details><summary><b>44</b> · <i>Nobody Knows</i> — A young man who answered a girl&#x27;s bold note stands tongue-tied beside her, while she accuses him of looking down on her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>47</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A household of dependents lives quietly under one master whose will shapes every corner and every day.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>48</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A family spends generations in brutal labour just to wring a living from ground that fights them at every turn.</summary><p class="sum">The family came west generations ago and struggled for years against stumps, stones and standing water to clear poor wooded land.</p></details><details><summary><b>49</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A son who struck his father in a drunken rage hides for days, waiting to learn whether he has killed him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>50</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An old father who has lost his sons and his wife gives up, and the youngest must be called home to take over.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>54</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man convinced he is meant for something great cannot see the people he is using up along the way.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>57</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An old way of living, rough but innocent, vanishes as the noise and hurry of a newer age fill everyone&#x27;s heads.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes how industrialism, newspapers and cities have since changed rural people, filling their heads with other men&#x27;s words and ending their old brutal innocence.</p></details><details><summary><b>58</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man reads every misfortune that falls on his family as a sign he is chosen, and his hunger for more grows.</summary><p class="sum">In those days God filled men&#x27;s hearts; the son saw his brothers&#x27; deaths and his father&#x27;s illness as signs from God, walked the hills at night, and grew greedy for more land.</p></details><details><summary><b>59</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man walking beyond his own boundaries feels that everything he can see should rightly belong to him.</summary><p class="sum">With his wife about to give birth, he walks far into his neighbours&#x27; land by moonlight, thinking it all should be his and blaming his dead brothers for not achieving more.</p></details><details><summary><b>66</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A bitter mother agrees to give up her son to the parent who never wanted her, saying it will be good for him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>67</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child sent to live with relatives brings warmth to a silent household, where a lonely woman pours out love on him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>69</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man who once demanded a sign that he was chosen now only prays for one, and half fears none will come.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>70</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A man torn between an old faith and the new rush for easy money urges a younger relative to chase the fortune he cannot.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>71</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A timid child flourishes once away from an unhappy home, though he still wonders about the parent he left behind.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>72</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child in a new home delights in small daily rituals, and softens even the grim old people around him.</summary><p class="sum">Each morning the boy counts the piglets, bangs through the house, and laughs at an old hand&#x27;s same daily joke in the barnyard.</p></details><details><summary><b>73</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An old man&#x27;s long-buried obsession resurfaces in front of the child he loves, and threatens to ruin their closeness.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>74</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child plays happily at an older relative&#x27;s side, unaware that the adult is working himself into a frenzy.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>75</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An obsessed man uses a trusting child as the instrument for the sign he has craved all his life.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>76</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — A child watches someone he loves turn into a frightening stranger in the grip of an obsession.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>77</b> · <i>Godliness</i> — An old man whose obsession has frightened and hurt the child he loves asks why heaven still will not approve of him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>79</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A lonely young woman arrives in a new place expecting warmth and freedom, and one early misstep closes the door.</summary><p class="sum">The merchant&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>80</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A lonely newcomer tries to win approval by excelling, and is held up as a model to the people she needs as friends.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>84</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A shy young man manages one awkward kind remark to a young woman who longs for him, and then flees.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes how town girls courted in closed parlours; one evening the son remarks awkwardly on how hard she works and hurries out.</p></details><details><summary><b>85</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young woman finally screws up the courage to go to the one she wants, and is forced to hide instead.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>86</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A lonely young woman puts her longing plainly into a note to a young man and waits, terrified, for his answer.</summary><p class="sum">Hiding, she overhears the daughter struggling and laughing in her suitor&#x27;s embrace; then she slips the son a note saying she wants someone to love and to come under her window.</p></details><details><summary><b>88</b> · <i>Surrender</i> — A young woman who believes she has been ignored bursts out to an awkward companion that she hates everyone.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>91</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A man who staked a fortune on a venture everyone laughed at wins big, and for once lets his delight show.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>92</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A boy on the edge of manhood wanders alone, wondering what he will become, and finds boyhood still easier.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>93</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A young person is summoned by an older relative with a familiar distant look that always means something frightening.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>94</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A child goes along with an older relative&#x27;s mysterious errand, holding something small and helpless in his arms.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>96</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A frightened child follows a relative back to a place of old terror, quietly preparing to escape with what he protects.</summary><p class="sum">At the same wood where he was frightened before, the boy trembles and plans escape, but follows, quietly untying the lamb&#x27;s legs so they can run away together.</p></details><details><summary><b>97</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A child sees an adult he trusts come toward him armed and muttering, lost in some private purpose.</summary><p class="sum">The old man builds a fire and, muttering that he must put the lamb&#x27;s blood on the boy&#x27;s head, walks toward him with a long knife.</p></details><details><summary><b>98</b> · <i>Terror</i> — A terrified young person strikes back at the relative he believes means to hurt him, and fears he has killed him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>102</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — An odd man interrupts a group&#x27;s serious talk to share a small discovery that thrills him and bores everyone else.</summary><p class="sum">He announces that the creek has risen without rain, describes measuring it and puzzling over it, and triumphantly concludes it must have rained upstream.</p></details><details><summary><b>103</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — An older man envies a young one&#x27;s position, insisting he was the one truly meant for it.</summary><p class="sum">He goes back to his rounds, then corners the young reporter, insisting he himself should have the boy&#x27;s job and could do it in his odd moments.</p></details><details><summary><b>106</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — A family of newcomers with a violent reputation is shunned and feared by everyone around them.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>107</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — Everyone waits nervously for the moment a suitor must face the dangerous family of the woman he loves.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>108</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — A man confronted by angry relatives of the woman he loves ignores their threats and carries them off with his enthusiasm.</summary><p class="sum">He arrives with an armful of weeds, ignores the son&#x27;s threat, and launches into an idea he wanted to explain to them and to her anyway.</p></details><details><summary><b>109</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — An odd man disarms his would-be enemies by treating them as an eager audience for his latest idea.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>110</b> · <i>A Man of Ideas</i> — The men who came to threaten an odd suitor walk off with him as his fascinated listeners.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>113</b> · <i>Adventure</i> — Two young people parting on the eve of one leaving swear to belong to each other whatever happens.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>125</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A man with a painful secret decides to tell it to one young person after seeing him on the edge of the same mistake.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>126</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A curious young man tries to draw out a silent older man, sensing he has something to say to him alone.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>129</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A bitter man recalls, despite himself, a time of simple happiness with the person who later betrayed him.</summary><p class="sum">He describes his devoted early marriage: planting a garden in spring while his wife handed him seeds and laughed at the worms.</p></details><details><summary><b>131</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A man who came hoping to forgive and be reconciled is met instead with a crude scheme that destroys all hope.</summary><p class="sum">Waiting two hours in the mother&#x27;s parlour, aching to forgive, he was confronted by his wife pushed in naked by her mother, who waited in the hall.</p></details><details><summary><b>132</b> · <i>Respectability</i> — A young man hears an older man&#x27;s story of betrayal and walks away feeling old and sick himself.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>135</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A parent who expects a child to tremble and weep when scolded finds the child simply looks back, and grows afraid.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>137</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man explains that he saw a foolish adventure through only to avoid being ashamed, and his parent cannot scold him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>142</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A quiet young man, furious at a talkative friend and at his own silence, storms off to speak for himself.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>144</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man who feels an outsider among his own people decides to leave, then nervously calls on the girl he cares for.</summary><p class="sum">He feels himself an outcast who does not belong, decides he is simply old beyond his years, and knocks awkwardly at the banker&#x27;s door.</p></details><details><summary><b>147</b> · <i>The Thinker</i> — A young man about to leave home begins to wish he could stay, for the sake of someone he has never spoken to plainly.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>155</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A quiet man respected in his position dreads the public part of his duties and prays each week for the courage to perform.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>157</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man of spotless reputation glimpses something forbidden, and his shock turns into a fixation disguised as concern for her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>158</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man tells himself his growing interest in a worldly neighbour is only a wish to help her, and works harder to reach her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>161</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man fighting a forbidden attraction tries to cure it by turning his attention back to his neglected spouse.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>163</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man who always lived by the rules is tempted for the first time and bitterly asks why this should happen to him.</summary><p class="sum">For weeks he is troubled and begins to blame God, asking why he, who never sought sin, should be tempted.</p></details><details><summary><b>167</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man spying on someone in secret sees her private anguish, and it changes utterly what he thought he was looking at.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>168</b> · <i>The Strength of God</i> — A man who has fought a secret temptation for months bursts in on a young acquaintance declaring himself miraculously set free.</summary><p class="sum">He smashes the window with his fist, runs to the young reporter&#x27;s office, and declares that God has revealed himself in the body of a woman and he is delivered.</p></details><details><summary><b>169</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A young man with a free day slips away from everyone to sit alone and think over something that puzzles him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>170</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A young man cannot make out what an older woman means by her earnest talks, and suspects, half pleased, that she loves him.</summary><p class="sum">He broods over his former teacher&#x27;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&#x27;s daughter.</p></details><details><summary><b>171</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — An old man doing a humble job through the night checks every door while everyone else sleeps.</summary><p class="sum">By night the snowbound town is asleep; the lame old night watchman makes his rounds, checks the doors, and settles by the hotel stove.</p></details><details><summary><b>172</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — An old man near the end of his working life dreams by the stove of a small new venture to see him through.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>174</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A stern person who keeps everyone at a distance sometimes bursts out with a warmth that bewilders the people in her charge.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>181</b> · <i>The Teacher</i> — A young man lies awake realising that someone had been trying to tell him something important, and he missed it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>183</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A childlike young man out in the wider world keeps colliding with money, sex and other people&#x27;s opinions, and retreats humiliated.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>187</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A man who lived happily in his own head grows lonely for real people and settles into a conventional marriage and job.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>191</b> · <i>Loneliness</i> — A young man wanders alone in a vague sadness he cannot explain, in a mood to understand another lonely person.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s illness and by thinking about himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>197</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A grown daughter still lives under the roof of a petty, fussy parent who once bullied her and now fears her.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>199</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A man who suddenly came into money spent it all in a few wild months and ended in a destructive rampage.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>202</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man alone at night plays out fantasies of command, trying on a grander self where nobody can see.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>203</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man is startled by a sudden insight and decides his real thoughts are better kept from his crude companions.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>204</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man with his head full of ideas wanders among poorer neighbours whose lives suddenly seem full of meaning.</summary><p class="sum">He wanders into the poor labourers&#x27; quarter, which stirs memories of stories of old-world towns, and turns into a dark alley behind the animal sheds.</p></details><details><summary><b>206</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A man who came to propose loses his nerve at the door and can only threaten the rival he fears.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>210</b> · <i>An Awakening</i> — A young man whose moment of exaltation ended in humiliation finds that everything that inspired him now looks shabby.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>212</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A family whose business and whose looks are a local joke carries on as if nobody noticed.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>213</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — An anxious man who cannot say yes or no is flattered by a smooth talker into buying what he can never sell.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>214</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man who can bear his family&#x27;s foolishness no longer lashes out wildly at the outsider taking advantage of it.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>215</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man who waits for a parent&#x27;s understanding gets only bewilderment, and storms off vowing to prove himself.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>217</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A young man in misery walks miles to the one simple soul he feels safe explaining himself to.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>221</b> · <i>“Queer”</i> — A tormented young man finally summons the person he resents, who comes along gladly hoping to become his friend.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>226</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A worn-out older man and a wild young one work side by side, as unlike each other as two people can be.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s notorious old reprobate.</p></details><details><summary><b>227</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — Young people told to despise a reckless man secretly admire him for refusing to live a humdrum life.</summary><p class="sum">The young man&#x27;s father died drunk, whipping his horses into an oncoming train, screaming with delight; the boys of the town secretly admired his foolish courage.</p></details><details><summary><b>230</b> · <i>The Untold Lie</i> — A young man in trouble asks an older friend to tell him plainly whether to do the expected thing or walk away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>236</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A capable old woman who has lost almost everyone works herself to the bone to keep a grandchild fed.</summary><p class="sum">A boy&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>238</b> · <i>Drink</i> — An old woman returning home finds it grown into a place she no longer knows, and must find work for herself and a grandchild.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s family, slipping in unnoticed.</p></details><details><summary><b>239</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A gentle youth who has seen everything ugly stays untouched by it, until hunger at home drives him to steal once.</summary><p class="sum">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&#x27;s till.</p></details><details><summary><b>240</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A dreamy youth keeps losing his place because he forgets his duties while quietly watching other people.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>241</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A grandparent and grandchild who have only each other share quiet evenings, the old one vowing never to leave.</summary><p class="sum">He rents a room in an old lawyer&#x27;s office; his grandmother visits, scrubs the place, and smokes a pipe with him, saying she will die when he is ready to die.</p></details><details><summary><b>245</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A young man slips away from company to drink alone for the first time, flooded with old memories.</summary><p class="sum">Bored by the men&#x27;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.</p></details><details><summary><b>248</b> · <i>Drink</i> — A gentle young man tries to explain that he hurt himself on purpose so as to learn what others know, without harming anyone.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>249</b> · <i>Death</i> — A shabby, forgotten place at the top of worn stairs is the one spot where certain lonely people feel at home.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes the worn, dim stairway to the doctor&#x27;s barn-like office, a hallway full of a store&#x27;s discarded rubbish, and a table heaped with books, bottles and a friend&#x27;s apples.</p></details><details><summary><b>259</b> · <i>Death</i> — Two lonely friends, after years of talk, suddenly reach for each other, both seeing the young person the other once was.</summary><p class="sum">She walks the office with a girlish swing and kneels by him; he takes her in his arms, kisses her and murmurs &#x27;You lovely dear&#x27;, seeing in her the young girl she once was.</p></details><details><summary><b>261</b> · <i>Death</i> — A young man hears of a parent&#x27;s death and feels mostly annoyance that it spoils his plans for the evening.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>264</b> · <i>Death</i> — A son who never really knew his mother senses, too late, the young woman she once was.</summary><p class="sum">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 &#x27;the lovely dear&#x27;.</p></details><details><summary><b>268</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A young person glimpses for the first time how small and uncertain their life is, and longs to be understood.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>269</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A young man who once boasted to impress someone now wants to show her the real change he feels in himself.</summary><p class="sum">His mind turns to the banker&#x27;s daughter; once he boasted to her on a country road, and now he wants to show her the change he feels in himself.</p></details><details><summary><b>272</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A proud young man, ashamed of how he once behaved, pretends not to care that the person he wants is with someone else.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>273</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A dejected young man, irritated by everyone&#x27;s bragging, resolves to go straight to the person he wants to see.</summary><p class="sum">Near tears, he is angered by a horseman&#x27;s boasting, tears his trousers on a barrel nail, and resolves to walk right into her house.</p></details><details><summary><b>274</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — A young woman is suffocated by her parent&#x27;s snobbery and a pompous visitor&#x27;s airs, and slips away.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>275</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — Two young people each running away from the crowd to find the other meet halfway, and hardly know what to say.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>276</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — Alone in a place just emptied of crowds, a person feels both how meaningless life is and how much he loves it.</summary><p class="sum">The narrator describes the empty fairground at night, full of the ghosts of the day&#x27;s living crowds, where one feels both life&#x27;s meaninglessness and an intense love of it.</p></details><details><summary><b>278</b> · <i>Sophistication</i> — Two young people reach the edge of romance and choose respect instead, easing the tension with play.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details><details><summary><b>282</b> · <i>Departure</i> — A young person leaving home is seen off by people who wish him well and then turn back to their own lives.</summary><p class="sum">A dozen people see him off and then talk of their own affairs; a woman who never noticed him says &#x27;Good luck&#x27;; the girl runs to say goodbye but he does not see her; he counts his money, anxious not to look green.</p></details><details><summary><b>283</b> · <i>Departure</i> — A young man leaving home finds he thinks only of small familiar scenes, as his old life fades behind him.</summary><p class="sum">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.</p></details></section>
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