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.

RESPECTABILITY

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody.  This monkey is a true monster.  In the completeness of his ugliness he achieved a kind of perverted beauty.  Children stopping before the cage are fascinated, men turn away with an air of disgust, and women linger for a moment, trying perhaps to remember which one of their male acquaintances the thing in some faint way resembles.

Had you been in the earlier years of your life a citizen of the village of Winesburg, Ohio, there would have been for you no mystery in regard to the beast in his cage.  “It is like Wash Williams,” you would have said.  “As he sits in the corner there, the beast is exactly like old Wash sitting on the grass in the station yard on a summer evening after he has closed his office for the night.”

Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town.  His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble.  He was dirty.  Everything about him was unclean.  Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled.

I go too fast.  Not everything about Wash was unclean.  He took care of his hands.  His fingers were fat, but there was something sensitive and shapely in the hand that lay on the table by the instrument in the telegraph office.  In his youth Wash Williams had been called the best telegraph operator in the state, and in spite of his degradement to the obscure office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.

Wash Williams did not associate with the men of the town in which he lived.  “I’ll have nothing to do with them,” he said, looking with bleary eyes at the men who walked along the station platform past the telegraph office.  Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed Griffith’s saloon, and after drinking unbelievable quantities of beer staggered off to his room in the New Willard House and to his bed for the night.