It was into this confusion that the Reverend Curtis Hartman protruded himself.  When he came in George Willard thought the town had gone mad.  Shaking a bleeding fist in the air, the minister proclaimed the woman George had only a moment before held in his arms an instrument of God bearing a message of truth.

* * *

George blew out the lamp by the window and locking the door of the printshop went home.  Through the hotel office, past Hop Higgins lost in his dream of the raising of ferrets, he went and up into his own room.  The fire in the stove had gone out and he undressed in the cold.  When he got into bed the sheets were like blankets of dry snow.

George Willard rolled about in the bed on which had lain in the afternoon hugging the pillow and thinking thoughts of Kate Swift.  The words of the minister, who he thought had gone suddenly insane, rang in his ears.  His eyes stared about the room.  The resentment, natural to the baffled male, passed and he tried to understand what had happened.  He could not make it out.  Over and over he turned the matter in his mind.  Hours passed and he began to think it must be time for another day to come.  At four o’clock he pulled the covers up about his neck and tried to sleep.  When he became drowsy and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it groped about in the darkness.  “I have missed something.  I have missed something Kate Swift was trying to tell me,” he muttered sleepily.  Then he slept and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that winter night to go to sleep.

LONELINESS

He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits.  The farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of the windows facing the road were kept closed.  In the road before the house a flock of chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust.  Enoch lived in the house with his mother in those days and when he was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High School.  Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth inclined to silence.  He walked in the middle of the road when he came into town and sometimes read a book.  Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make him realize where he was so that he would turn out of the beaten track and let them pass.

When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York City and was a city man for fifteen years.  He studied French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing.  In his own mind he planned to go to Paris and to finish his art education among the masters there, but that never turned out.