Winesburg, Ohio: Mother

Elizabeth Willard, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with smallpox scars.

Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure.

Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about, doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of fat traveling men.

The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. When he thought of her he grew angry and swore.

In the boyish figure she yearned to see something half forgotten that had once been a part of herself recreated.

"If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared.

"I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy be allowed to express something for us both."

The communion between George Willard and his mother was outwardly a formal thing without meaning.

Once when she was alone, and after watching a prolonged and ineffectual outburst on the part of the baker, Elizabeth Willard put her head down on her long white hands and wept.

"I think you had better be out among the boys. You are too much indoors," she said, striving to relieve the embarrassment of the departure.

One evening in July, when the transient guests who made the New Willard House their temporary home had become scarce, and the hallways, lighted only by kerosene lamps turned low, were plunged in gloom, Elizabeth Willard had an adventure.

The hotel was continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby.

The hotel was continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby.

"He is groping about, trying to find himself," she thought.

"He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself."

Tom Willard was ambitious for his son.

Now, with a ring of earnestness in his voice, he was advising concerning some course of conduct.

"Will Henderson has spoken to me three times concerning the matter. He says you go along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky girl. What ails you?"

It was always the same, beginning with kisses and ending, after strange wild emotions, with peace and then sobbing repentance.

The strength that had been as a miracle in her body left and she half reeled across the floor, clutching at the back of the chair in which she had spent so many long days staring out over the tin roofs into the main street of Winesburg.