prompt:
Chapter: ADVENTURE

Alice Hindman, a woman of twenty-seven when George
Willard was a mere boy, had lived in Winesburg all her
life. She clerked in Winney's Dry Goods Store and lived
with her mother, who had married a second husband.

Alice's step-father was a carriage painter, and given
to drink. His story is an odd one. It will be worth
telling some day.

At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat slight.
Her head was large and overshadowed her body. Her
shoulders were a little stooped and her hair and eyes
brown. She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior
a continual ferment went on.

When she was a girl of sixteen and before she began to
work in the store, Alice had an affair with a young
man. The young man, named Ned Currie, was older than
Alice. He, like George Willard, was employed on the
Winesburg Eagle and for a long time he went to see
Alice almost every evening. Together the two walked
under the trees through the streets of the town and
talked of what they would do with their lives. Alice
was then a very pretty girl and Ned Currie took her
into his arms and kissed her. He became excited and
said things he did not intend to say and Alice,
betrayed by her desire to have something beautiful come
into her rather narrow life, also grew excited. She
also talked. The outer crust of her life, all of her
natural diffidence and reserve, was torn away and she
gave herself over to the emotions of love. When, late
in the fall of her sixteenth year, Ned Currie went away
to Cleveland where he hoped to get a place on a city
newspaper and rise in the world, she wanted to go with
him. With a trembling voice she told him what was in
her mind. "I will work and you can work," she said. "I
do not want to harness you to a needless expense that
will prevent your making progress. Don't marry me now.
We will get along without that and we can be together.
Even though we live in the same house no one will say
anything. In the city we will be unknown and people
will pay no attention to us."

Ned Currie was puzzled by the determination and abandon
of his sweetheart and was also deeply touched. He had
wanted the girl to become his mistress but changed his
mind. He wanted to protect and care for her. "You don't
know what you're talking about," he said sharply; "you
may be sure I'll let you do no such thing. As soon as I
get a good job I'll come back. For the present you'll
have to stay here. It's the only thing we can do."

On the evening before he left Winesburg to take up his
new life in the city, Ned Currie went to call on Alice.
They walked about through the streets for an hour and
then got a rig from Wesley Moyer's livery and went for
a drive in the country. The moon came up and they found
themselves unable to talk. In his sadness the young man
forgot the resolutions he had made regarding his
conduct with the girl.

They got out of the buggy at a place where a long
meadow ran down to the bank of Wine Creek and there in
the dim light became lovers. When at midnight they
returned to town they were both glad. It did not seem
to them that anything that could happen in the future
could blot out the wonder and beauty of the thing that
had happened. "Now we will have to stick to each other,
whatever happens we will have to do that," Ned Currie
said as he left the girl at her father's door.

The young newspaper man did not succeed in getting a
place on a Cleveland paper and went west to Chicago.
For a time he was lonely and wrote to Alice almost
every day. Then he was caught up by the life of the
city; he began to make friends and found new interests
in life. In Chicago he boarded at a house where there
were several women. One of them attracted his attention
and he forgot Alice in Winesburg. At the end of a year
he had stopped writing letters, and only once in a long
time, when he was lonely or when he went into one of
the city parks and saw the moon shining on the grass as
it had shone that night on the meadow by Wine Creek,
did he think of her at all.

In Winesburg the girl who had been loved grew to be a
woman. When she was twenty-two years old her father,
who owned a harness repair shop, died suddenly. The
harness maker was an old soldier, and after a few
months his wife received a widow's pension. She used
the first money she got to buy a loom and became a
weaver of carpets, and Alice got a place in Winney's
store. For a number of years nothing could have induced
her to believe that Ned Currie would not in the end
return to her.

She was glad to be employed because the daily round of
toil in the store made the time of waiting seem less
long and uninteresting. She began to save money,
thinking that when she had saved two or three hundred
dollars she would follow her lover to the city and try
if her presence would not win back his affections.

Alice did not blame Ned Currie for what had happened in
the moonlight in the field, but felt that she could
never marry another man. To her the thought of giving
to another what she still felt could belong only to Ned
seemed monstrous. When other young men tried to attract
her attention she would have nothing to do with them.
"I am his wife and shall remain his wife whether he
comes back or not," she whispered to herself, and for
all of her willingness to support herself could not
have understood the growing modern idea of a woman's
owning herself and giving and taking for her own ends
in life.

Alice worked in the dry goods store from eight in the
morning until six at night and on three evenings a week
went back to the store to stay from seven until nine.
As time passed and she became more and more lonely she
began to practice the devices common to lonely people.
When at night she went upstairs into her own room she
knelt on the floor to pray and in her prayers whispered
things she wanted to say to her lover. She became
attached to inanimate objects, and because it was her
own, could not bare to have anyone touch the furniture
of her room. The trick of saving money, begun for a
purpose, was carried on after the scheme of going to
the city to find Ned Currie had been given up. It
became a fixed habit, and when she needed new clothes
she did not get them. Sometimes on rainy afternoons in
the store she got out her bank book and, letting it lie
open before her, spent hours dreaming impossible dreams
of saving money enough so that the interest would
support both herself and her future husband.

"Ned always liked to travel about," she thought. "I'll
give him the chance. Some day when we are married and I
can save both his money and my own, we will be rich.
Then we can travel together all over the world."

In the dry goods store weeks ran into months and months
into years as Alice waited and dreamed of her lover's
return. Her employer, a grey old man with false teeth
and a thin grey mustache that drooped down over his
mouth, was not given to conversation, and sometimes, on
rainy days and in the winter when a storm raged in Main
Street, long hours passed when no customers came in.
Alice arranged and rearranged the stock. She stood near
the front window where she could look down the deserted
street and thought of the evenings when she had walked
with Ned Currie and of what he had said. "We will have
to stick to each other now." The words echoed and
re-echoed through the mind of the maturing woman. Tears
came into her eyes. Sometimes when her employer had
gone out and she was alone in the store she put her
head on the counter and wept. "Oh, Ned, I am waiting,"
she whispered over and over, and all the time the
creeping fear that he would never come back grew
stronger within her.

In the spring when the rains have passed and before the
long hot days of summer have come, the country about
Winesburg is delightful. The town lies in the midst of
open fields, but beyond the fields are pleasant patches
of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little
cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to sit
on Sunday afternoons. Through the trees they look out
across the fields and see farmers at work about the
barns or people driving up and down on the roads. In
the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes,
looking like a toy thing in the distance.

For several years after Ned Currie went away Alice did
not go into the wood with the other young people on
Sunday, but one day after he had been gone for two or
three years and when her loneliness seemed unbearable,
she put on her best dress and set out. Finding a little
sheltered place from which she could see the town and a
long stretch of the fields, she sat down. Fear of age
and ineffectuality took possession of her. She could
not sit still, and arose. As she stood looking out over
the land something, perhaps the thought of never
ceasing life as it expresses itself in the flow of the
seasons, fixed her mind on the passing years. With a
shiver of dread, she realized that for her the beauty
and freshness of youth had passed. For the first time
she felt that she had been cheated. She did not blame
Ned Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness
swept over her. Dropping to her knees, she tried to
pray, but instead of prayers words of protest came to
her lips. "It is not going to come to me. I will never
find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?" she cried,
and an odd sense of relief came with this, her first
bold attempt to face the fear that had become a part of
her everyday life.

In the year when Alice Hindman became twenty-five two
things happened to disturb the dull uneventfulness of
her days. Her mother married Bush Milton, the carriage
painter of Winesburg, and she herself became a member
of the Winesburg Methodist Church. Alice joined the
church because she had become frightened by the
loneliness of her position in life. Her mother's second
marriage had emphasized her isolation. "I am becoming
old and queer. If Ned comes he will not want me. In the
city where he is living men are perpetually young.
There is so much going on that they do not have time to
grow old," she told herself with a grim little smile,
and went resolutely about the business of becoming
acquainted with people. Every Thursday evening when the
store had closed she went to a prayer meeting in the
basement of the church and on Sunday evening attended a
meeting of an organization called The Epworth League.

When Will Hurley, a middle-aged man who clerked in a
drug store and who also belonged to the church, offered
to walk home with her she did not protest. "Of course I
will not let him make a practice of being with me, but
if he comes to see me once in a long time there can be
no harm in that," she told herself, still determined in
her loyalty to Ned Currie.

Without realizing what was happening, Alice was trying
feebly at first, but with growing determination, to get
a new hold upon life. Beside the drug clerk she walked
in silence, but sometimes in the darkness as they went
stolidly along she put out her hand and touched softly
the folds of his coat. When he left her at the gate
before her mother's house she did not go indoors, but
stood for a moment by the door. She wanted to call to
the drug clerk, to ask him to sit with her in the
darkness on the porch before the house, but was afraid
he would not understand. "It is not him that I want,"
she told herself; "I want to avoid being so much alone.
If I am not careful I will grow unaccustomed to being
with people."

            *       *       *

During the early fall of her twenty-seventh year a
passionate restlessness took possession of Alice. She
could not bear to be in the company of the drug clerk,
and when, in the evening, he came to walk with her she
sent him away. Her mind became intensely active and
when, weary from the long hours of standing behind the
counter in the store, she went home and crawled into
bed, she could not sleep. With staring eyes she looked
into the darkness. Her imagination, like a child
awakened from long sleep, played about the room. Deep
within her there was something that would not be
cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite
answer from life.

Alice took a pillow into her arms and held it tightly
against her breasts. Getting out of bed, she arranged a
blanket so that in the darkness it looked like a form
lying between the sheets and, kneeling beside the bed,
she caressed it, whispering words over and over, like a
refrain. "Why doesn't something happen? Why am I left
here alone?" she muttered. Although she sometimes
thought of Ned Currie, she no longer depended on him.
Her desire had grown vague. She did not want Ned Currie
or any other man. She wanted to be loved, to have
something answer the call that was growing louder and
louder within her.

And then one night when it rained Alice had an
adventure. It frightened and confused her. She had come
home from the store at nine and found the house empty.
Bush Milton had gone off to town and her mother to the
house of a neighbor. Alice went upstairs to her room
and undressed in the darkness. For a moment she stood
by the window hearing the rain beat against the glass
and then a strange desire took possession of her.
Without stopping to think of what she intended to do,
she ran downstairs through the dark house and out into
the rain. As she stood on the little grass plot before
the house and felt the cold rain on her body a mad
desire to run naked through the streets took possession
of her.

She thought that the rain would have some creative and
wonderful effect on her body. Not for years had she
felt so full of youth and courage. She wanted to leap
and run, to cry out, to find some other lonely human
and embrace him. On the brick sidewalk before the house
a man stumbled homeward. Alice started to run. A wild,
desperate mood took possession of her. "What do I care
who it is. He is alone, and I will go to him," she
thought; and then without stopping to consider the
possible result of her madness, called softly. "Wait!"
she cried. "Don't go away. Whoever you are, you must
wait."

The man on the sidewalk stopped and stood listening.
He was an old man and somewhat deaf. Putting his hand
to his mouth, he shouted. "What? What say?" he called.

Alice dropped to the ground and lay trembling. She was
so frightened at the thought of what she had done that
when the man had gone on his way she did not dare get
to her feet, but crawled on hands and knees through the
grass to the house. When she got to her own room she
bolted the door and drew her dressing table across the
doorway. Her body shook as with a chill and her hands
trembled so that she had difficulty getting into her
nightdress. When she got into bed she buried her face
in the pillow and wept brokenheartedly. "What is the
matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am
not careful," she thought, and turning her face to the
wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the
fact that many people must live and die alone, even in
Winesburg.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Twenty-seven-year-old Alice Hindman has lived in Winesburg all her life. She works as a clerk in the dry goods store. When she was a young woman of sixteen, she had a romance with Ned Currie. Just before he went away to the city to make his career, they had sexual relations. When he first got to the city, Ned wrote to Alice regularly, but eventually he forgot about her. For a long time, Alice waited for him. Even when she acknowledged he was not coming, she could not give herself to another man. Now, realizing that she is becoming a hermit, and desperately needing love, Alice tries to reach out to people, but she becomes restless. One night, she runs out in the rain naked as an attempt to feel alive. She accosts an old, deaf man on the sidewalk, but then she is appalled with what she has done and crawls home.


prompt:
Chapter: AN AWAKENING

Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick
lips. She was tall and strong. When black thoughts
visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man
and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in
the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during
the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of
the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter,
bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and
lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine
trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty
tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the
back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal
drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the
night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life
almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from
girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The
bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he
stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat
that had become shabby with age. At night when he
returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the
streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for
the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were
placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the
boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind
the dining room door. If they were moved during the day
he was speechless with anger and did not recover his
equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of
his daughter. She, he realized, knew the story of his
brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it.
One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of
soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the
mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the
pressing of trousers and then went back to her work
feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening
with George Willard. Secretly she loved another man,
but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused
her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby,
bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with
the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.
She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender and
walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very
insistent in her nature. She felt that she could keep
the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was
somewhat uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall, broad-shouldered man
of thirty who lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's
saloon. His fists were large and his eyes unusually
small, but his voice, as though striving to conceal the
power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm
from an uncle in Indiana. When sold, the farm brought
in eight thousand dollars, which Ed spent in six
months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an
orgy of dissipation, the story of which afterward
filled his home town with awe. Here and there he went
throwing the money about, driving carriages through the
streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and
women, playing cards for high stakes and keeping
mistresses whose wardrobes cost him hundreds of
dollars. One night at a resort called Cedar Point, he
got into a fight and ran amuck like a wild thing. With
his fist he broke a large mirror in the wash room of a
hotel and later went about smashing windows and
breaking chairs in dance halls for the joy of hearing
the glass rattle on the floor and seeing the terror in
the eyes of clerks who had come from Sandusky to spend
the evening at the resort with their sweethearts.

The affair between Ed Handby and Belle Carpenter on the
surface amounted to nothing. He had succeeded in
spending but one evening in her company. On that
evening he hired a horse and buggy at Wesley Moyer's
livery barn and took her for a drive. The conviction
that she was the woman his nature demanded and that he
must get her settled upon him and he told her of his
desires. The bartender was ready to marry and to begin
trying to earn money for the support of his wife, but
so simple was his nature that he found it difficult to
explain his intentions. His body ached with physical
longing and with his body he expressed himself. Taking
the milliner into his arms and holding her tightly in
spite of her struggles, he kissed her until she became
helpless. Then he brought her back to town and let her
out of the buggy. "When I get hold of you again I'll
not let you go. You can't play with me," he declared as
he turned to drive away. Then, jumping out of the
buggy, he gripped her shoulders with his strong hands.
"I'll keep you for good the next time," he said. "You
might as well make up your mind to that. It's you and
me for it and I'm going to have you before I get
through."

One night in January when there was a new moon George
Willard, who was in Ed Handby's mind the only obstacle
to his getting Belle Carpenter, went for a walk. Early
that evening George went into Ransom Surbeck's pool
room with Seth Richmond and Art Wilson, son of the town
butcher. Seth Richmond stood with his back against the
wall and remained silent, but George Willard talked.
The pool room was filled with Winesburg boys and they
talked of women. The young reporter got into that vein.
He said that women should look out for themselves, that
the fellow who went out with a girl was not responsible
for what happened. As he talked he looked about, eager
for attention. He held the floor for five minutes and
then Art Wilson began to talk. Art was learning the
barber's trade in Cal Prouse's shop and already began
to consider himself an authority in such matters as
baseball, horse racing, drinking, and going about with
women. He began to tell of a night when he with two men
from Winesburg went into a house of prostitution at the
county seat. The butcher's son held a cigar in the side
of his mouth and as he talked spat on the floor. "The
women in the place couldn't embarrass me although they
tried hard enough," he boasted. "One of the girls in
the house tried to get fresh, but I fooled her. As soon
as she began to talk I went and sat in her lap.
Everyone in the room laughed when I kissed her. I
taught her to let me alone."

George Willard went out of the pool room and into Main
Street. For days the weather had been bitter cold with
a high wind blowing down on the town from Lake Erie,
eighteen miles to the north, but on that night the wind
had died away and a new moon made the night unusually
lovely. Without thinking where he was going or what he
wanted to do, George went out of Main Street and began
walking in dimly lighted streets filled with frame
houses.

Out of doors under the black sky filled with stars he
forgot his companions of the pool room. Because it was
dark and he was alone he began to talk aloud. In a
spirit of play he reeled along the street imitating a
drunken man and then imagined himself a soldier clad in
shining boots that reached to the knees and wearing a
sword that jingled as he walked. As a soldier he
pictured himself as an inspector, passing before a long
line of men who stood at attention. He began to examine
the accoutrements of the men. Before a tree he stopped
and began to scold. "Your pack is not in order," he
said sharply. "How many times will I have to speak of
this matter? Everything must be in order here. We have
a difficult task before us and no difficult task can be
done without order."

Hypnotized by his own words, the young man stumbled
along the board sidewalk saying more words. "There is a
law for armies and for men too," he muttered, lost in
reflection. "The law begins with little things and
spreads out until it covers everything. In every little
thing there must be order, in the place where men work,
in their clothes, in their thoughts. I myself must be
orderly. I must learn that law. I must get myself into
touch with something orderly and big that swings
through the night like a star. In my little way I must
begin to learn something, to give and swing and work
with life, with the law."

George Willard stopped by a picket fence near a street
lamp and his body began to tremble. He had never before
thought such thoughts as had just come into his head
and he wondered where they had come from. For the
moment it seemed to him that some voice outside of
himself had been talking as he walked. He was amazed
and delighted with his own mind and when he walked on
again spoke of the matter with fervor. "To come out of
Ransom Surbeck's pool room and think things like that,"
he whispered. "It is better to be alone. If I talked
like Art Wilson the boys would understand me but they
wouldn't understand what I've been thinking down here."

In Winesburg, as in all Ohio towns of twenty years ago,
there was a section in which lived day laborers. As the
time of factories had not yet come, the laborers worked
in the fields or were section hands on the railroads.
They worked twelve hours a day and received one dollar
for the long day of toil. The houses in which they
lived were small cheaply constructed wooden affairs
with a garden at the back. The more comfortable among
them kept cows and perhaps a pig, housed in a little
shed at the rear of the garden.

With his head filled with resounding thoughts, George
Willard walked into such a street on the clear January
night. The street was dimly lighted and in places there
was no sidewalk. In the scene that lay about him there
was something that excited his already aroused fancy.
For a year he had been devoting all of his odd moments
to the reading of books and now some tale he had read
concerning life in old world towns of the middle ages
came sharply back to his mind so that he stumbled
forward with the curious feeling of one revisiting a
place that had been a part of some former existence. On
an impulse he turned out of the street and went into a
little dark alleyway behind the sheds in which lived
the cows and pigs.

For a half hour he stayed in the alleyway, smelling the
strong smell of animals too closely housed and letting
his mind play with the strange new thoughts that came
to him. The very rankness of the smell of manure in the
clear sweet air awoke something heady in his brain. The
poor little houses lighted by kerosene lamps, the smoke
from the chimneys mounting straight up into the clear
air, the grunting of pigs, the women clad in cheap
calico dresses and washing dishes in the kitchens, the
footsteps of men coming out of the houses and going off
to the stores and saloons of Main Street, the dogs
barking and the children crying--all of these things
made him seem, as he lurked in the darkness, oddly
detached and apart from all life.

The excited young man, unable to bear the weight of his
own thoughts, began to move cautiously along the
alleyway. A dog attacked him and had to be driven away
with stones, and a man appeared at the door of one of
the houses and swore at the dog. George went into a
vacant lot and throwing back his head looked up at the
sky. He felt unutterably big and remade by the simple
experience through which he had been passing and in a
kind of fervor of emotion put up his hands, thrusting
them into the darkness above his head and muttering
words. The desire to say words overcame him and he said
words without meaning, rolling them over on his tongue
and saying them because they were brave words, full of
meaning. "Death," he muttered, "night, the sea, fear,
loveliness."

George Willard came out of the vacant lot and stood
again on the sidewalk facing the houses. He felt that
all of the people in the little street must be brothers
and sisters to him and he wished he had the courage to
call them out of their houses and to shake their hands.
"If there were only a woman here I would take hold of
her hand and we would run until we were both tired
out," he thought. "That would make me feel better."
With the thought of a woman in his mind he walked out
of the street and went toward the house where Belle
Carpenter lived. He thought she would understand his
mood and that he could achieve in her presence a
position he had long been wanting to achieve. In the
past when he had been with her and had kissed her lips
he had come away filled with anger at himself. He had
felt like one being used for some obscure purpose and
had not enjoyed the feeling. Now he thought he had
suddenly become too big to be used.

When George got to Belle Carpenter's house there had
already been a visitor there before him. Ed Handby had
come to the door and calling Belle out of the house had
tried to talk to her. He had wanted to ask the woman to
come away with him and to be his wife, but when she
came and stood by the door he lost his self-assurance
and became sullen. "You stay away from that kid," he
growled, thinking of George Willard, and then, not
knowing what else to say, turned to go away. "If I
catch you together I will break your bones and his
too," he added. The bartender had come to woo, not to
threaten, and was angry with himself because of his
failure.

When her lover had departed Belle went indoors and ran
hurriedly upstairs. From a window at the upper part of
the house she saw Ed Handby cross the street and sit
down on a horse block before the house of a neighbor.
In the dim light the man sat motionless holding his
head in his hands. She was made happy by the sight, and
when George Willard came to the door she greeted him
effusively and hurriedly put on her hat. She thought
that, as she walked through the streets with young
Willard, Ed Handby would follow and she wanted to make
him suffer.

For an hour Belle Carpenter and the young reporter
walked about under the trees in the sweet night air.
George Willard was full of big words. The sense of
power that had come to him during the hour in the
darkness in the alleyway remained with him and he
talked boldly, swaggering along and swinging his arms
about. He wanted to make Belle Carpenter realize that
he was aware of his former weakness and that he had
changed. "You'll find me different," he declared,
thrusting his hands into his pockets and looking boldly
into her eyes. "I don't know why but it is so. You've
got to take me for a man or let me alone. That's how it
is."

Up and down the quiet streets under the new moon went
the woman and the boy. When George had finished talking
they turned down a side street and went across a bridge
into a path that ran up the side of a hill. The hill
began at Waterworks Pond and climbed upward to the
Winesburg Fair Grounds. On the hillside grew dense
bushes and small trees and among the bushes were little
open spaces carpeted with long grass, now stiff and
frozen.

As he walked behind the woman up the hill George
Willard's heart began to beat rapidly and his shoulders
straightened. Suddenly he decided that Belle Carpenter
was about to surrender herself to him. The new force
that had manifested itself in him had, he felt, been at
work upon her and had led to her conquest. The thought
made him half drunk with the sense of masculine power.
Although he had been annoyed that as they walked about
she had not seemed to be listening to his words, the
fact that she had accompanied him to this place took
all his doubts away. "It is different. Everything has
become different," he thought and taking hold of her
shoulder turned her about and stood looking at her, his
eyes shining with pride.

Belle Carpenter did not resist. When he kissed her
upon the lips she leaned heavily against him and looked
over his shoulder into the darkness. In her whole
attitude there was a suggestion of waiting. Again, as
in the alleyway, George Willard's mind ran off into
words and, holding the woman tightly he whispered the
words into the still night. "Lust," he whispered, "lust
and night and women."

George Willard did not understand what happened to him
that night on the hillside. Later, when he got to his
own room, he wanted to weep and then grew half insane
with anger and hate. He hated Belle Carpenter and was
sure that all his life he would continue to hate her.
On the hillside he had led the woman to one of the
little open spaces among the bushes and had dropped to
his knees beside her. As in the vacant lot, by the
laborers' houses, he had put up his hands in gratitude
for the new power in himself and was waiting for the
woman to speak when Ed Handby appeared.

The bartender did not want to beat the boy, who he
thought had tried to take his woman away. He knew that
beating was unnecessary, that he had power within
himself to accomplish his purpose without using his
fists. Gripping George by the shoulder and pulling him
to his feet, he held him with one hand while he looked
at Belle Carpenter seated on the grass. Then with a
quick wide movement of his arm he sent the younger man
sprawling away into the bushes and began to bully the
woman, who had risen to her feet. "You're no good," he
said roughly. "I've half a mind not to bother with you.
I'd let you alone if I didn't want you so much."

On his hands and knees in the bushes George Willard
stared at the scene before him and tried hard to think.
He prepared to spring at the man who had humiliated
him. To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than
to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.

Three times the young reporter sprang at Ed Handby and
each time the bartender, catching him by the shoulder,
hurled him back into the bushes. The older man seemed
prepared to keep the exercise going indefinitely but
George Willard's head struck the root of a tree and he
lay still. Then Ed Handby took Belle Carpenter by the
arm and marched her away.

George heard the man and woman making their way through
the bushes. As he crept down the hillside his heart was
sick within him. He hated himself and he hated the fate
that had brought about his humiliation. When his mind
went back to the hour alone in the alleyway he was
puzzled and stopping in the darkness listened, hoping
to hear again the voice outside himself that had so
short a time before put new courage into his heart.
When his way homeward led him again into the street of
frame houses he could not bear the sight and began to
run, wanting to get quickly out of the neighborhood
that now seemed to him utterly squalid and commonplace.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: George often goes to see Belle Carpenter, a young milliner who lives with her father Henry, a bookkeeper in the local bank. Belle is in love with the bartender Ed Handby, even though they have only spent one evening in each other's company. Belle walks in the evenings with George as an outlet for her passion for the other man. She even allows George to kiss her. One night in January, George goes out for a walk and has an epiphany. He realizes that all people are connected through laws and a supreme order. He himself, he believes, must become more a part of that great connection. He finds himself moved by powerful words that he utters: "death,. night, the sea, fear, loveliness" . He goes to find Belle to tell her about his thoughts, but she just wants to make Ed jealous. When they go to a secluded spot to embrace, Ed shows up and tosses George aside. He does not want to beat George up; he just wants him out of the way. He does this three times, as George tries to charge the older man again and again. Then, Ed leaves with Belle and George is left with no more grand thoughts.


prompt:
Chapter: DEATH

The stairway leading up to Doctor Reefy's office, in
the Heffner Block above the Paris Dry Goods store, was
but dimly lighted. At the head of the stairway hung a
lamp with a dirty chimney that was fastened by a
bracket to the wall. The lamp had a tin reflector,
brown with rust and covered with dust. The people who
went up the stairway followed with their feet the feet
of many who had gone before. The soft boards of the
stairs had yielded under the pressure of feet and deep
hollows marked the way.

At the top of the stairway a turn to the right brought
you to the doctor's door. To the left was a dark
hallway filled with rubbish. Old chairs, carpenter's
horses, step ladders and empty boxes lay in the
darkness waiting for shins to be barked. The pile of
rubbish belonged to the Paris Dry Goods Company. When a
counter or a row of shelves in the store became
useless, clerks carried it up the stairway and threw it
on the pile.

Doctor Reefy's office was as large as a barn. A stove
with a round paunch sat in the middle of the room.
Around its base was piled sawdust, held in place by
heavy planks nailed to the floor. By the door stood a
huge table that had once been a part of the furniture
of Herrick's Clothing Store and that had been used for
displaying custom-made clothes. It was covered with
books, bottles, and surgical instruments. Near the edge
of the table lay three or four apples left by John
Spaniard, a tree nurseryman who was Doctor Reefy's
friend, and who had slipped the apples out of his
pocket as he came in at the door.

At middle age Doctor Reefy was tall and awkward. The
grey beard he later wore had not yet appeared, but on
the upper lip grew a brown mustache. He was not a
graceful man, as when he grew older, and was much
occupied with the problem of disposing of his hands and
feet.

On summer afternoons, when she had been married many
years and when her son George was a boy of twelve or
fourteen, Elizabeth Willard sometimes went up the worn
steps to Doctor Reefy's office. Already the woman's
naturally tall figure had begun to droop and to drag
itself listlessly about. Ostensibly she went to see the
doctor because of her health, but on the half dozen
occasions when she had been to see him the outcome of
the visits did not primarily concern her health. She
and the doctor talked of that but they talked most of
her life, of their two lives and of the ideas that had
come to them as they lived their lives in Winesburg.

In the big empty office the man and the woman sat
looking at each other and they were a good deal alike.
Their bodies were different, as were also the color of
their eyes, the length of their noses, and the
circumstances of their existence, but something inside
them meant the same thing, wanted the same release,
would have left the same impression on the memory of an
onlooker. Later, and when he grew older and married a
young wife, the doctor often talked to her of the hours
spent with the sick woman and expressed a good many
things he had been unable to express to Elizabeth. He
was almost a poet in his old age and his notion of what
happened took a poetic turn. "I had come to the time in
my life when prayer became necessary and so I invented
gods and prayed to them," he said. "I did not say my
prayers in words nor did I kneel down but sat perfectly
still in my chair. In the late afternoon when it was
hot and quiet on Main Street or in the winter when the
days were gloomy, the gods came into the office and I
thought no one knew about them. Then I found that this
woman Elizabeth knew, that she worshipped also the same
gods. I have a notion that she came to the office
because she thought the gods would be there but she was
happy to find herself not alone just the same. It was
an experience that cannot be explained, although I
suppose it is always happening to men and women in all
sorts of places."

            *       *       *

On the summer afternoons when Elizabeth and the doctor
sat in the office and talked of their two lives they
talked of other lives also. Sometimes the doctor made
philosophic epigrams. Then he chuckled with amusement.
Now and then after a period of silence, a word was said
or a hint given that strangely illuminated the life of
the speaker, a wish became a desire, or a dream, half
dead, flared suddenly into life. For the most part the
words came from the woman and she said them without
looking at the man.

Each time she came to see the doctor the hotel keeper's
wife talked a little more freely and after an hour or
two in his presence went down the stairway into Main
Street feeling renewed and strengthened against the
dullness of her days. With something approaching a
girlhood swing to her body she walked along, but when
she had got back to her chair by the window of her room
and when darkness had come on and a girl from the hotel
dining room brought her dinner on a tray, she let it
grow cold. Her thoughts ran away to her girlhood with
its passionate longing for adventure and she remembered
the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a
possible thing for her. Particularly she remembered one
who had for a time been her lover and who in the moment
of his passion had cried out to her more than a hundred
times, saying the same words madly over and over: "You
dear! You dear! You lovely dear!" The words, she
thought, expressed something she would have liked to
have achieved in life.

In her room in the shabby old hotel the sick wife of
the hotel keeper began to weep and, putting her hands
to her face, rocked back and forth. The words of her
one friend, Doctor Reefy, rang in her ears. "Love is
like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black
night," he had said. "You must not try to make love
definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try
to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath
the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot
day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust
from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made
tender by kisses."

Elizabeth Willard could not remember her mother who had
died when she was but five years old. Her girlhood had
been lived in the most haphazard manner imaginable. Her
father was a man who had wanted to be let alone and the
affairs of the hotel would not let him alone. He also
had lived and died a sick man. Every day he arose with
a cheerful face, but by ten o'clock in the morning all
the joy had gone out of his heart. When a guest
complained of the fare in the hotel dining room or one
of the girls who made up the beds got married and went
away, he stamped on the floor and swore. At night when
he went to bed he thought of his daughter growing up
among the stream of people that drifted in and out of
the hotel and was overcome with sadness. As the girl
grew older and began to walk out in the evening with
men he wanted to talk to her, but when he tried was not
successful. He always forgot what he wanted to say and
spent the time complaining of his own affairs.

In her girlhood and young womanhood Elizabeth had tried
to be a real adventurer in life. At eighteen life had
so gripped her that she was no longer a virgin but,
although she had a half dozen lovers before she married
Tom Willard, she had never entered upon an adventure
prompted by desire alone. Like all the women in the
world, she wanted a real lover. Always there was
something she sought blindly, passionately, some hidden
wonder in life. The tall beautiful girl with the
swinging stride who had walked under the trees with men
was forever putting out her hand into the darkness and
trying to get hold of some other hand. In all the
babble of words that fell from the lips of the men with
whom she adventured she was trying to find what would
be for her the true word.

Elizabeth had married Tom Willard, a clerk in her
father's hotel, because he was at hand and wanted to
marry at the time when the determination to marry came
to her. For a while, like most young girls, she thought
marriage would change the face of life. If there was in
her mind a doubt of the outcome of the marriage with
Tom she brushed it aside. Her father was ill and near
death at the time and she was perplexed because of the
meaningless outcome of an affair in which she had just
been involved. Other girls of her age in Winesburg were
marrying men she had always known, grocery clerks or
young farmers. In the evening they walked in Main
Street with their husbands and when she passed they
smiled happily. She began to think that the fact of
marriage might be full of some hidden significance.
Young wives with whom she talked spoke softly and
shyly. "It changes things to have a man of your own,"
they said.

On the evening before her marriage the perplexed girl
had a talk with her father. Later she wondered if the
hours alone with the sick man had not led to her
decision to marry. The father talked of his life and
advised the daughter to avoid being led into another
such muddle. He abused Tom Willard, and that led
Elizabeth to come to the clerk's defense. The sick man
became excited and tried to get out of bed. When she
would not let him walk about he began to complain.
"I've never been let alone," he said. "Although I've
worked hard I've not made the hotel pay. Even now I owe
money at the bank. You'll find that out when I'm gone."

The voice of the sick man became tense with
earnestness. Being unable to arise, he put out his hand
and pulled the girl's head down beside his own.
"There's a way out," he whispered. "Don't marry Tom
Willard or anyone else here in Winesburg. There is
eight hundred dollars in a tin box in my trunk. Take it
and go away."

Again the sick man's voice became querulous. "You've
got to promise," he declared. "If you won't promise not
to marry, give me your word that you'll never tell Tom
about the money. It is mine and if I give it to you
I've the right to make that demand. Hide it away. It is
to make up to you for my failure as a father. Some time
it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.
Come now, I tell you I'm about to die, give me your
promise."

            *       *       *

In Doctor Reefy's office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old
woman at forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and
looked at the floor. By a small desk near the window
sat the doctor. His hands played with a lead pencil
that lay on the desk. Elizabeth talked of her life as a
married woman. She became impersonal and forgot her
husband, only using him as a lay figure to give point
to her tale. "And then I was married and it did not
turn out at all," she said bitterly. "As soon as I had
gone into it I began to be afraid. Perhaps I knew too
much before and then perhaps I found out too much
during my first night with him. I don't remember.

"What a fool I was. When father gave me the money and
tried to talk me out of the thought of marriage, I
would not listen. I thought of what the girls who were
married had said of it and I wanted marriage also. It
wasn't Tom I wanted, it was marriage. When father went
to sleep I leaned out of the window and thought of the
life I had led. I didn't want to be a bad woman. The
town was full of stories about me. I even began to be
afraid Tom would change his mind."

The woman's voice began to quiver with excitement. To
Doctor Reefy, who without realizing what was happening
had begun to love her, there came an odd illusion. He
thought that as she talked the woman's body was
changing, that she was becoming younger, straighter,
stronger. When he could not shake off the illusion his
mind gave it a professional twist. "It is good for both
her body and her mind, this talking," he muttered.

The woman began telling of an incident that had
happened one afternoon a few months after her marriage.
Her voice became steadier. "In the late afternoon I
went for a drive alone," she said. "I had a buggy and a
little grey pony I kept in Moyer's Livery. Tom was
painting and repapering rooms in the hotel. He wanted
money and I was trying to make up my mind to tell him
about the eight hundred dollars father had given to me.
I couldn't decide to do it. I didn't like him well
enough. There was always paint on his hands and face
during those days and he smelled of paint. He was
trying to fix up the old hotel, and make it new and
smart."

The excited woman sat up very straight in her chair and
made a quick girlish movement with her hand as she told
of the drive alone on the spring afternoon. "It was
cloudy and a storm threatened," she said. "Black clouds
made the green of the trees and the grass stand out so
that the colors hurt my eyes. I went out Trunion Pike a
mile or more and then turned into a side road. The
little horse went quickly along up hill and down. I was
impatient. Thoughts came and I wanted to get away from
my thoughts. I began to beat the horse. The black
clouds settled down and it began to rain. I wanted to
go at a terrible speed, to drive on and on forever. I
wanted to get out of town, out of my clothes, out of my
marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I almost
killed the horse, making him run, and when he could not
run any more I got out of the buggy and ran afoot into
the darkness until I fell and hurt my side. I wanted to
run away from everything but I wanted to run towards
something too. Don't you see, dear, how it was?"

Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk
about in the office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought
he had never seen anyone walk before. To her whole body
there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him. When
she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair he
took her into his arms and began to kiss her
passionately. "I cried all the way home," she said, as
she tried to continue the story of her wild ride, but
he did not listen. "You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you
lovely dear!" he muttered and thought he held in his
arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely
and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to
project herself out of the husk of the body of the
tired-out woman.

Doctor Reefy did not see the woman he had held in his
arms again until after her death. On the summer
afternoon in the office when he was on the point of
becoming her lover a half grotesque little incident
brought his love-making quickly to an end. As the man
and woman held each other tightly heavy feet came
tramping up the office stairs. The two sprang to their
feet and stood listening and trembling. The noise on
the stairs was made by a clerk from the Paris Dry Goods
Company. With a loud bang he threw an empty box on the
pile of rubbish in the hallway and then went heavily
down the stairs. Elizabeth followed him almost
immediately. The thing that had come to life in her as
she talked to her one friend died suddenly. She was
hysterical, as was also Doctor Reefy, and did not want
to continue the talk. Along the street she went with
the blood still singing in her body, but when she
turned out of Main Street and saw ahead the lights of
the New Willard House, she began to tremble and her
knees shook so that for a moment she thought she would
fall in the street.

The sick woman spent the last few months of her life
hungering for death. Along the road of death she went,
seeking, hungering. She personified the figure of death
and made him now a strong black-haired youth running
over hills, now a stern quiet man marked and scarred by
the business of living. In the darkness of her room she
put out her hand, thrusting it from under the covers of
her bed, and she thought that death like a living thing
put out his hand to her. "Be patient, lover," she
whispered. "Keep yourself young and beautiful and be
patient."

On the evening when disease laid its heavy hand upon
her and defeated her plans for telling her son George
of the eight hundred dollars hidden away, she got out
of bed and crept half across the room pleading with
death for another hour of life. "Wait, dear! The boy!
The boy! The boy!" she pleaded as she tried with all of
her strength to fight off the arms of the lover she had
wanted so earnestly.

            *       *       *

Elizabeth died one day in March in the year when her
son George became eighteen, and the young man had but
little sense of the meaning of her death. Only time
could give him that. For a month he had seen her lying
white and still and speechless in her bed, and then one
afternoon the doctor stopped him in the hallway and
said a few words.

The young man went into his own room and closed the
door. He had a queer empty feeling in the region of his
stomach. For a moment he sat staring at, the floor and
then jumping up went for a walk. Along the station
platform he went, and around through residence streets
past the high-school building, thinking almost entirely
of his own affairs. The notion of death could not get
hold of him and he was in fact a little annoyed that
his mother had died on that day. He had just received a
note from Helen White, the daughter of the town banker,
in answer to one from him. "Tonight I could have gone
to see her and now it will have to be put off," he
thought half angrily.

Elizabeth died on a Friday afternoon at three o'clock.
It had been cold and rainy in the morning but in the
afternoon the sun came out. Before she died she lay
paralyzed for six days unable to speak or move and with
only her mind and her eyes alive. For three of the six
days she struggled, thinking of her boy, trying to say
some few words in regard to his future, and in her eyes
there was an appeal so touching that all who saw it
kept the memory of the dying woman in their minds for
years. Even Tom Willard, who had always half resented
his wife, forgot his resentment and the tears ran out
of his eyes and lodged in his mustache. The mustache
had begun to turn grey and Tom colored it with dye.
There was oil in the preparation he used for the
purpose and the tears, catching in the mustache and
being brushed away by his hand, formed a fine mist-like
vapor. In his grief Tom Willard's face looked like the
face of a little dog that has been out a long time in
bitter weather.

George came home along Main Street at dark on the day
of his mother's death and, after going to his own room
to brush his hair and clothes, went along the hallway
and into the room where the body lay. There was a
candle on the dressing table by the door and Doctor
Reefy sat in a chair by the bed. The doctor arose and
started to go out. He put out his hand as though to
greet the younger man and then awkwardly drew it back
again. The air of the room was heavy with the presence
of the two self-conscious human beings, and the man
hurried away.

The dead woman's son sat down in a chair and looked at
the floor. He again thought of his own affairs and
definitely decided he would make a change in his life,
that he would leave Winesburg. "I will go to some city.
Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper," he thought,
and then his mind turned to the girl with whom he was
to have spent this evening and again he was half angry
at the turn of events that had prevented his going to
her.

In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young
man began to have thoughts. His mind played with
thoughts of life as his mother's mind had played with
the thought of death. He closed his eyes and imagined
that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own
lips. His body trembled and his hands shook. And then
something happened. The boy sprang to his feet and
stood stiffly. He looked at the figure of the dead
woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept
over him so that he began to weep. A new notion came
into his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about
as though afraid he would be observed.

George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift
the sheet from the body of his mother and look at her
face. The thought that had come into his mind gripped
him terribly. He became convinced that not his mother
but someone else lay in the bed before him. The
conviction was so real that it was almost unbearable.
The body under the sheets was long and in death looked
young and graceful. To the boy, held by some strange
fancy, it was unspeakably lovely. The feeling that the
body before him was alive, that in another moment a
lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront
him, became so overpowering that he could not bear the
suspense. Again and again he put out his hand. Once he
touched and half lifted the white sheet that covered
her, but his courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy,
turned and went out of the room. In the hallway outside
the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put
a hand against the wall to support himself. "That's not
my mother. That's not my mother in there," he whispered
to himself and again his body shook with fright and
uncertainty. When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who had come to
watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he
put his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his
head from side to side, half blind with grief. "My
mother is dead," he said, and then forgetting the woman
he turned and stared at the door through which he had
just come. "The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,"
the boy, urged by some impulse outside himself,
muttered aloud.

As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had
kept hidden so long and that was to give George Willard
his start in the city, it lay in the tin box behind the
plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had
put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the
plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the
workmen her husband was at that time employing about
the hotel to mend the wall. "I jammed the corner of the
bed against it," she had explained to her husband,
unable at the moment to give up her dream of release,
the release that after all came to her but twice in her
life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor
Reefy held her in their arms.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Elizabeth Willard often visited Doctor Reefy in her middle age. Together, they would discuss their lives and people in town. They became friends and almost became lovers. She told him about her life and when she spoke, she seemed like a younger woman, not the old, worn out woman she had become. When she tried to communicate how she had longed for love, he embraced her. Just then, they were interrupted by footsteps and she ran out of Doctor Reefy's office. Elizabeth explained to her friend that she had had several lovers before marrying Tom Willard, and she had married him because he was available when she was ready to be married. Her father tried to convince her not to marry Tom, but to take $800 he had saved and flee. When she decided to marry Tom anyway, he gave her the money and encouraged her never to tell Tom about it. Very quickly, her marriage was a disappointment. She hid the money behind her wall and left it there for many years. She died before she could tell her son George, who is eighteen years old, about the money. After his mother's death, George decided he would leave Winesburg and get a job on a city newspaper somewhere. As he sat in the room with his mother's corpse, he also imagined himself kissing Helen White, but then he felt ashamed of his thoughts and began to cry. He left the room sobbing and full of grief.


prompt:
Chapter: DEPARTURE

Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the
morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were
just coming out of their buds. The trees along the
residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds
are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily
about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot.

George came downstairs into the hotel office carrying a
brown leather bag. His trunk was packed for departure.
Since two o'clock he had been awake thinking of the
journey he was about to take and wondering what he
would find at the end of his journey. The boy who slept
in the hotel office lay on a cot by the door. His mouth
was open and he snored lustily. George crept past the
cot and went out into the silent deserted main street.
The east was pink with the dawn and long streaks of
light climbed into the sky where a few stars still
shone.

Beyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg
there is a great stretch of open fields. The fields are
owned by farmers who live in town and drive homeward at
evening along Trunion Pike in light creaking wagons. In
the fields are planted berries and small fruits. In the
late afternoon in the hot summers when the road and the
fields are covered with dust, a smoky haze lies over
the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like
looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land
is green the effect is somewhat different. The land
becomes a wide green billiard table on which tiny human
insects toil up and down.

All through his boyhood and young manhood George
Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion
Pike. He had been in the midst of the great open place
on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only
the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the
fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when
the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April
morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in
the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down
by a little stream two miles from town and then turned
and walked silently back again. When he got to Main
Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the
stores. "Hey, you George. How does it feel to be going
away?" they asked.

The westbound train leaves Winesburg at seven
forty-five in the morning. Tom Little is conductor. His
train runs from Cleveland to where it connects with a
great trunk line railroad with terminals in Chicago and
New York. Tom has what in railroad circles is called an
"easy run." Every evening he returns to his family. In
the fall and spring he spends his Sundays fishing in
Lake Erie. He has a round red face and small blue eyes.
He knows the people in the towns along his railroad
better than a city man knows the people who live in his
apartment building.

George came down the little incline from the New
Willard House at seven o'clock. Tom Willard carried his
bag. The son had become taller than the father.

On the station platform everyone shook the young man's
hand. More than a dozen people waited about. Then they
talked of their own affairs. Even Will Henderson, who
was lazy and often slept until nine, had got out of
bed. George was embarrassed. Gertrude Wilmot, a tall
thin woman of fifty who worked in the Winesburg post
office, came along the station platform. She had never
before paid any attention to George. Now she stopped
and put out her hand. In two words she voiced what
everyone felt. "Good luck," she said sharply and then
turning went on her way.

When the train came into the station George felt
relieved. He scampered hurriedly aboard. Helen White
came running along Main Street hoping to have a parting
word with him, but he had found a seat and did not see
her. When the train started Tom Little punched his
ticket, grinned and, although he knew George well and
knew on what adventure he was just setting out, made no
comment. Tom had seen a thousand George Willards go out
of their towns to the city. It was a commonplace enough
incident with him. In the smoking car there was a man
who had just invited Tom to go on a fishing trip to
Sandusky Bay. He wanted to accept the invitation and
talk over details.

George glanced up and down the car to be sure no one
was looking, then took out his pocket-book and counted
his money. His mind was occupied with a desire not to
appear green. Almost the last words his father had said
to him concerned the matter of his behavior when he got
to the city. "Be a sharp one," Tom Willard had said.
"Keep your eyes on your money. Be awake. That's the
ticket. Don't let anyone think you're a greenhorn."

After George counted his money he looked out of the
window and was surprised to see that the train was
still in Winesburg.

The young man, going out of his town to meet the
adventure of life, began to think but he did not think
of anything very big or dramatic. Things like his
mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the
uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious
and larger aspects of his life did not come into his
mind.

He thought of little things--Turk Smollet wheeling
boards through the main street of his town in the
morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once
stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler
the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the
streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his
hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg
post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.

The young man's mind was carried away by his growing
passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have
thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection
of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes
and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for
a long time and when he aroused himself and again
looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had
disappeared and his life there had become but a
background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: George Willard leaves Winesburg to go make his way in the big city. Several people see him off at the station, but Helen White is too late to wish him farewell. He thinks of mundane things as he waits for the train to pull out of the station. The conductor, who has seen many young men starting off on this journey, says nothing to George about what an important day this is.


prompt:
Chapter: DRINK

Tom Foster came to Winesburg from Cincinnati when he
was still young and could get many new impressions. His
grandmother had been raised on a farm near the town and
as a young girl had gone to school there when Winesburg
was a village of twelve or fifteen houses clustered
about a general store on the Trunion Pike.

What a life the old woman had led since she went away
from the frontier settlement and what a strong, capable
little old thing she was! She had been in Kansas, in
Canada, and in New York City, traveling about with her
husband, a mechanic, before he died. Later she went to
stay with her daughter, who had also married a mechanic
and lived in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from
Cincinnati.

Then began the hard years for Tom Foster's grandmother.
First her son-in-law was killed by a policeman during a
strike and then Tom's mother became an invalid and died
also. The grandmother had saved a little money, but it
was swept away by the illness of the daughter and by
the cost of the two funerals. She became a half
worn-out old woman worker and lived with the grandson
above a junk shop on a side street in Cincinnati. For
five years she scrubbed the floors in an office
building and then got a place as dish washer in a
restaurant. Her hands were all twisted out of shape.
When she took hold of a mop or a broom handle the hands
looked like the dried stems of an old creeping vine
clinging to a tree.

The old woman came back to Winesburg as soon as she got
the chance. One evening as she was coming home from
work she found a pocket-book containing thirty-seven
dollars, and that opened the way. The trip was a great
adventure for the boy. It was past seven o'clock at
night when the grandmother came home with the
pocket-book held tightly in her old hands and she was
so excited she could scarcely speak. She insisted on
leaving Cincinnati that night, saying that if they
stayed until morning the owner of the money would be
sure to find them out and make trouble. Tom, who was
then sixteen years old, had to go trudging off to the
station with the old woman, bearing all of their
earthly belongings done up in a worn-out blanket and
slung across his back. By his side walked the
grandmother urging him forward. Her toothless old mouth
twitched nervously, and when Tom grew weary and wanted
to put the pack down at a street crossing, she snatched
it up and if he had not prevented would have slung it
across her own back. When they got into the train and
it had run out of the city she was as delighted as a
girl and talked as the boy had never heard her talk
before.

All through the night as the train rattled along, the
grandmother told Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he
would enjoy his life working in the fields and shooting
wild things in the woods there. She could not believe
that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown
into a thriving town in her absence, and in the morning
when the train came to Winesburg did not want to get
off. "It isn't what I thought. It may be hard for you
here," she said, and then the train went on its way and
the two stood confused, not knowing where to turn, in
the presence of Albert Longworth, the Winesburg baggage
master.

But Tom Foster did get along all right. He was one to
get along anywhere. Mrs. White, the banker's wife,
employed his grandmother to work in the kitchen and he
got a place as stable boy in the banker's new brick
barn.

In Winesburg servants were hard to get. The woman who
wanted help in her housework employed a "hired girl"
who insisted on sitting at the table with the family.
Mrs. White was sick of hired girls and snatched at the
chance to get hold of the old city woman. She furnished
a room for the boy Tom upstairs in the barn. "He can
mow the lawn and run errands when the horses do not
need attention," she explained to her husband.

Tom Foster was rather small for his age and had a large
head covered with stiff black hair that stood straight
up. The hair emphasized the bigness of his head. His
voice was the softest thing imaginable, and he was
himself so gentle and quiet that he slipped into the
life of the town without attracting the least bit of
attention.

One could not help wondering where Tom Foster got his
gentleness. In Cincinnati he had lived in a
neighborhood where gangs of tough boys prowled through
the streets, and all through his early formative years
he ran about with tough boys. For a while he was a
messenger for a telegraph company and delivered
messages in a neighborhood sprinkled with houses of
prostitution. The women in the houses knew and loved
Tom Foster and the tough boys in the gangs loved him
also.

He never asserted himself. That was one thing that
helped him escape. In an odd way he stood in the shadow
of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.
He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed
their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys
fighting and listened to their tales of thieving and
drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.

Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in
the city. The grandmother was ill at the time and he
himself was out of work. There was nothing to eat in
the house, and so he went into a harness shop on a side
street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of
the cash drawer.

The harness shop was run by an old man with a long
mustache. He saw the boy lurking about and thought
nothing of it. When he went out into the street to talk
to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the
money walked away. Later he was caught and his
grandmother settled the matter by offering to come
twice a week for a month and scrub the shop. The boy
was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. "It is all
right to be ashamed and makes me understand new
things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know
what the boy was talking about but loved him so much
that it didn't matter whether she understood or not.

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker's stable and
then lost his place there. He didn't take very good
care of the horses and he was a constant source of
irritation to the banker's wife. She told him to mow
the lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store
or to the post office and he did not come back but
joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole
afternoon with them, standing about, listening and
occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words. As in
the city in the houses of prostitution and with the
rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in
Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to
be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life
about him.

After Tom lost his place at Banker White's he did not
live with his grandmother, although often in the
evening she came to visit him. He rented a room at the
rear of a little frame building belonging to old Rufus
Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off
Main Street, and had been used for years as a law
office by the old man, who had become too feeble and
forgetful for the practice of his profession but did
not realize his inefficiency. He liked Tom and let him
have the room for a dollar a month. In the late
afternoon when the lawyer had gone home the boy had the
place to himself and spent hours lying on the floor by
the stove and thinking of things. In the evening the
grandmother came and sat in the lawyer's chair to smoke
a pipe while Tom remained silent, as he always did in
the presence of everyone.

Often the old woman talked with great vigor. Sometimes
she was angry about some happening at the banker's
house and scolded away for hours. Out of her own
earnings she bought a mop and regularly scrubbed the
lawyer's office. Then when the place was spotlessly
clean and smelled clean she lighted her clay pipe and
she and Tom had a smoke together. "When you get ready
to die then I will die also," she said to the boy lying
on the floor beside her chair.

Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg. He did odd jobs,
such as cutting wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the
grass before houses. In late May and early June he
picked strawberries in the fields. He had time to loaf
and he enjoyed loafing. Banker White had given him a
cast-off coat which was too large for him, but his
grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat,
got at the same place, that was lined with fur. The fur
was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in
the winter Tom slept in it. He thought his method of
getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied
with the way life in Winesburg had turned out for him.

The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy.
That, I suppose, was why people loved him. In Hern's
Grocery they would be roasting coffee on Friday
afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade,
and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster
appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store. For
an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still,
filling his being with the spicy odor that made him
half drunk with happiness. "I like it," he said gently.
"It makes me think of things far away, places and
things like that."

One night Tom Foster got drunk. That came about in a
curious way. He never had been drunk before, and indeed
in all his life had never taken a drink of anything
intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that
one time and so went and did it.

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out
many things, things about ugliness and crime and lust.
Indeed, he knew more of these things than anyone else
in Winesburg. The matter of sex in particular had
presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had
made a deep impression on his mind. He thought, after
what he had seen of the women standing before the
squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen
in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them,
that he would put sex altogether out of his own life.
One of the women of the neighborhood tempted him once
and he went into a room with her. He never forgot the
smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into
the eyes of the woman. It sickened him and in a very
terrible way left a scar on his soul. He had always
before thought of women as quite innocent things, much
like his grandmother, but after that one experience in
the room he dismissed women from his mind. So gentle
was his nature that he could not hate anything and not
being able to understand he decided to forget.

And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg. After he
had lived there for two years something began to stir
in him. On all sides he saw youth making love and he
was himself a youth. Before he knew what had happened
he was in love also. He fell in love with Helen White,
daughter of the man for whom he had worked, and found
himself thinking of her at night.

That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own
way. He let himself think of Helen White whenever her
figure came into his mind and only concerned himself
with the manner of his thoughts. He had a fight, a
quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his
desires in the channel where he thought they belonged,
but on the whole he was victorious.

And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom
was wild on that night. He was like an innocent young
buck of the forest that has eaten of some maddening
weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in
one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg
was any the worse for Tom's outbreak.

In the first place, the night was one to make a
sensitive nature drunk. The trees along the residence
streets of the town were all newly clothed in soft
green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were
puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air
there was a hush, a waiting kind of silence very
stirring to the blood.

Tom left his room on Duane Street just as the young
night began to make itself felt. First he walked
through the streets, going softly and quietly along,
thinking thoughts that he tried to put into words. He
said that Helen White was a flame dancing in the air
and that he was a little tree without leaves standing
out sharply against the sky. Then he said that she was
a wind, a strong terrible wind, coming out of the
darkness of a stormy sea and that he was a boat left on
the shore of the sea by a fisherman.

That idea pleased the boy and he sauntered along
playing with it. He went into Main Street and sat on
the curbing before Wacker's tobacco store. For an hour
he lingered about listening to the talk of men, but it
did not interest him much and he slipped away. Then he
decided to get drunk and went into Willy's saloon and
bought a bottle of whiskey. Putting the bottle into his
pocket, he walked out of town, wanting to be alone to
think more thoughts and to drink the whiskey.

Tom got drunk sitting on a bank of new grass beside the
road about a mile north of town. Before him was a white
road and at his back an apple orchard in full bloom. He
took a drink out of the bottle and then lay down on the
grass. He thought of mornings in Winesburg and of how
the stones in the graveled driveway by Banker White's
house were wet with dew and glistened in the morning
light. He thought of the nights in the barn when it
rained and he lay awake hearing the drumming of the
raindrops and smelling the warm smell of horses and of
hay. Then he thought of a storm that had gone roaring
through Winesburg several days before and, his mind
going back, he relived the night he had spent on the
train with his grandmother when the two were coming
from Cincinnati. Sharply he remembered how strange it
had seemed to sit quietly in the coach and to feel the
power of the engine hurling the train along through the
night.

Tom got drunk in a very short time. He kept taking
drinks from the bottle as the thoughts visited him and
when his head began to reel got up and walked along the
road going away from Winesburg. There was a bridge on
the road that ran out of Winesburg north to Lake Erie
and the drunken boy made his way along the road to the
bridge. There he sat down. He tried to drink again, but
when he had taken the cork out of the bottle he became
ill and put it quickly back. His head was rocking back
and forth and so he sat on the stone approach to the
bridge and sighed. His head seemed to be flying about
like a pinwheel and then projecting itself off into
space and his arms and legs flopped helplessly about.

At eleven o'clock Tom got back into town. George
Willard found him wandering about and took him into the
Eagle printshop. Then he became afraid that the drunken
boy would make a mess on the floor and helped him into
the alleyway.

The reporter was confused by Tom Foster. The drunken
boy talked of Helen White and said he had been with her
on the shore of a sea and had made love to her. George
had seen Helen White walking in the street with her
father during the evening and decided that Tom was out
of his head. A sentiment concerning Helen White that
lurked in his own heart flamed up and he became angry.
"Now you quit that," he said. "I won't let Helen
White's name be dragged into this. I won't let that
happen." He began shaking Tom's shoulder, trying to
make him understand. "You quit it," he said again.

For three hours the two young men, thus strangely
thrown together, stayed in the printshop. When he had a
little recovered George took Tom for a walk. They went
into the country and sat on a log near the edge of a
wood. Something in the still night drew them together
and when the drunken boy's head began to clear they
talked.

"It was good to be drunk," Tom Foster said. "It taught
me something. I won't have to do it again. I will think
more dearly after this. You see how it is."

George Willard did not see, but his anger concerning
Helen White passed and he felt drawn toward the pale,
shaken boy as he had never before been drawn toward
anyone. With motherly solicitude, he insisted that Tom
get to his feet and walk about. Again they went back to
the printshop and sat in silence in the darkness.

The reporter could not get the purpose of Tom Foster's
action straightened out in his mind. When Tom spoke
again of Helen White he again grew angry and began to
scold. "You quit that," he said sharply. "You haven't
been with her. What makes you say you have? What makes
you keep saying such things? Now you quit it, do you
hear?"

Tom was hurt. He couldn't quarrel with George Willard
because he was incapable of quarreling, so he got up to
go away. When George Willard was insistent he put out
his hand, laying it on the older boy's arm, and tried
to explain.

"Well," he said softly, "I don't know how it was. I was
happy. You see how that was. Helen White made me happy
and the night did too. I wanted to suffer, to be hurt
somehow. I thought that was what I should do. I wanted
to suffer, you see, because everyone suffers and does
wrong. I thought of a lot of things to do, but they
wouldn't work. They all hurt someone else."

Tom Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he
became almost excited. "It was like making love, that's
what I mean," he explained. "Don't you see how it is?
It hurt me to do what I did and made everything
strange. That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught
me something, that's it, that's what I wanted. Don't
you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see.
That's why I did it."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom Foster moved to Winesburg with his grandmother as a teenager. She cleans Banker White's house. Tom used to be the stable boy at the Whites' house, but because he is rather dreamy and irresponsible, he lost that position. Now, he does odd jobs and is quite happy. His grandmother comes regularly to clean his rented rooms, and he has a rather oddly disciplined approach to life experiences. He wants to do things, but he chooses specific experiences and then goes out and intentionally lives them. For example, having fallen in love with Helen White, he limits what he allows himself to think about her. One night, he decides he ought to try drinking to see what it feels like. He buys a bottle of whiskey and walks about a mile north of town, where he sits on a bank of grass and gets drunk. In his drunkenness, he goes and talks to George Willard about Helen. George is upset at first, but then they cement a bond between them. Tom decides that, now that he has been drunk, he will not need to try it again.