The son shook his head.  “I suppose I can’t make you understand, but oh, I wish I could,” he said earnestly.  “I can’t even talk to father about it.  I don’t try.  There isn’t any use.  I don’t know what I shall do.  I just want to go away and look at people and think.”

Silence fell upon the room where the boy and woman sat together.  Again, as on the other evenings, they were embarrassed.  After a time the boy tried again to talk.  “I suppose it won’t be for a year or two but I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, rising and going toward the door.  “Something father said makes it sure that I shall have to go away.”  He fumbled with the doorknob.  In the room the silence became unbearable to the woman.  She wanted to cry out with joy because of the words that had come from the lips of her son, but the expression of joy had become impossible to her.  “I think you had better go out among the boys.  You are too much indoors,” she said.  “I thought I would go for a little walk,” replied the son stepping awkwardly out of the room and closing the door.

THE PHILOSOPHER

Doctor Parcival was a large man with a drooping mouth covered by a yellow mustache.  He always wore a dirty white waistcoat out of the pockets of which protruded a number of the kind of black cigars known as stogies.  His teeth were black and irregular and there was something strange about his eyes.  The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor’s head playing with the cord.

Doctor Parcival had a liking for the boy, George Willard.  It began when George had been working for a year on the Winesburg Eagle and the acquaintanceship was entirely a matter of the doctor’s own making.

In the late afternoon Will Henderson, owner and editor of the Eagle, went over to Tom Willy’s saloon.  Along an alleyway he went and slipping in at the back door of the saloon began drinking a drink made of a combination of sloe gin and soda water.  Will Henderson was a sensualist and had reached the age of forty-five.  He imagined the gin renewed the youth in him.  Like most sensualists he enjoyed talking of women, and for an hour he lingered about gossiping with Tom Willy.  The saloon keeper was a short, broad-shouldered man with peculiarly marked hands.  That flaming kind of birthmark that sometimes paints with red the faces of men and women had touched with red Tom Willy’s fingers and the backs of his hands.  As he stood by the bar talking to Will Henderson he rubbed the hands together.  As he grew more and more excited the red of his fingers deepened.  It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood that had dried and faded.

As Will Henderson stood at the bar looking at the red hands and talking of women, his assistant, George Willard, sat in the office of the Winesburg Eagle and listened to the talk of Doctor Parcival.