Winesburg, Ohio: Loneliness

He studied French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing.

In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men.

Once he got drunk and was taken to a police station where a police magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging house.

The woman had been drinking and the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of a building and laughed so heartily that another man stopped and laughed with her.

The two went away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his room trembling and vexed.

There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk.

On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished.

He was too excited to talk coherently. When he tried he sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded strange and squeaky to him.

In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door.

The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a complete egotist, as all children are egotists.

He wanted most of all the people of his own mind, people with whom he could really talk, people he could harangue and scold by the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy.

When in the evening he came home from work he got off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind some business man, striving to look very substantial and important.

When in the evening he came home from work he got off a streetcar and walked sedately along behind some business man, striving to look very substantial and important.

He began to tell little lies about business engagements that would give him freedom to walk alone in the street at night and, the chance offering, he secretly re-rented the room facing Washington Square.

Then Mrs. Al Robinson died on the farm near Winesburg, and he got eight thousand dollars from the bank that acted as trustee of her estate.

The fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn't that way.

In gardens back of houses in Winesburg dry shriveled potato vines lay sprawling on the ground.

"You'll understand if you try hard enough," he said conclusively.

A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room, although almost bare of furniture, was scrupulously clean.

She saw me in the hallway of the house and we got acquainted.