On the winter night when she walked through the deserted snow-covered streets, a crisis had come into the life of the school teacher.  Although no one in Winesburg would have suspected it, her life had been very adventurous.  It was still adventurous.  Day by day as she worked in the schoolroom or walked in the streets, grief, hope, and desire fought within her.  Behind a cold exterior the most extraordinary events transpired in her mind.  The people of the town thought of her as a confirmed old maid and because she spoke sharply and went her own way thought her lacking in all the human feeling that did so much to make and mar their own lives.  In reality she was the most eagerly passionate soul among them, and more than once, in the five years since she had come back from her travels to settle in Winesburg and become a school teacher, had been compelled to go out of the house and walk half through the night fighting out some battle raging within.  Once on a night when it rained she had stayed out six hours and when she came home had a quarrel with Aunt Elizabeth Swift.  “I am glad you’re not a man,” said the mother sharply.  “More than once I’ve waited for your father to come home, not knowing what new mess he had got into.  I’ve had my share of uncertainty and you cannot blame me if I do not want to see the worst side of him reproduced in you.”

* * *

Kate Swift’s mind was ablaze with thoughts of George Willard.  In something he had written as a school boy she thought she had recognized the spark of genius and wanted to blow on the spark.  One day in the summer she had gone to the Eagle office and finding the boy unoccupied had taken him out Main Street to the Fair Ground, where the two sat on a grassy bank and talked.  The school teacher tried to bring home to the mind of the boy some conception of the difficulties he would have to face as a writer.  “You will have to know life,” she declared, and her voice trembled with earnestness.  She took hold of George Willard’s shoulders and turned him about so that she could look into his eyes.  A passer-by might have thought them about to embrace.  “If you are to become a writer you’ll have to stop fooling with words,” she explained.  “It would be better to give up the notion of writing until you are better prepared.  Now it’s time to be living.  I don’t want to frighten you, but I would like to make you understand the import of what you think of attempting.  You must not become a mere peddler of words.  The thing to learn is to know what people are thinking about, not what they say.”

On the evening before that stormy Thursday night when the Reverend Curtis Hartman sat in the bell tower of the church waiting to look at her body, young Willard had gone to visit the teacher and to borrow a book.  It was then the thing happened that confused and puzzled the boy.  He had the book under his arm and was preparing to depart.  Again Kate Swift talked with great earnestness.  Night was coming on and the