by her womanhood.  In the darkness he took hold of her hand and when she crept close put a hand on her shoulder.  A wind began to blow and he shivered.  With all his strength he tried to hold and to understand the mood that had come upon him.  In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited.  In the mind of each was the same thought.  “I have come to this lonely place and here is this other,” was the substance of the thing felt.

In Winesburg the crowded day had run itself out into the long night of the late fall.  Farm horses jogged away along lonely country roads pulling their portion of weary people.  Clerks began to bring samples of goods in off the sidewalks and lock the doors of stores.  In the Opera House a crowd had gathered to see a show and further down Main Street the fiddlers, their instruments tuned, sweated and worked to keep the feet of youth flying over a dance floor.

In the darkness in the grand-stand Helen White and George Willard remained silent.  Now and then the spell that held them was broken and they turned and tried in the dim light to see into each other’s eyes.  They kissed but that impulse did not last.  At the upper end of the Fair Ground a half dozen men worked over horses that had raced during the afternoon.  The men had built a fire and were heating kettles of water.  Only their legs could be seen as they passed back and forth in the light.  When the wind blew the little flames of the fire danced crazily about.

George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness.  They went along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut.  The wind whispered among the dry corn blades.  For a moment during the walk back into town the spell that held them was broken.  When they had come to the crest of Waterworks Hill they stopped by a tree and George again put his hands on the girl’s shoulders.  She embraced him eagerly and then again they drew quickly back from that impulse.  They stopped kissing and stood a little apart.  Mutual respect grew big in them.  They were both embarrassed and to relieve their embarrassment dropped into the animalism of youth.  They laughed and began to pull and haul at each other.  In some way chastened and purified by the mood they had been in, they became, not man and woman, not boy and girl, but excited little animals.

It was so they went down the hill.  In the darkness they played like two splendid young things in a young world.  Once, running swiftly forward, Helen tripped George and he fell.  He squirmed and shouted.  Shaking with laughter, he roiled down the hill.  Helen ran after him.  For just a moment she stopped in the darkness.  There was no way of knowing what woman’s thoughts went through her mind but, when the bottom of the hill was reached and she came up to the boy, she took his arm and walked beside him in dignified silence.  For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their silent evening together the thing needed.  Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.