Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson.  He could draw well enough and he had many odd delicate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might have expressed themselves through the brush of a painter, but he was always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly development.  He never grew up and of course he couldn’t understand people and he couldn’t make people understand him.  The child in him kept bumping against things, against actualities like money and sex and opinions.  Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against an iron post.  That made him lame.  It was one of the many things that kept things from turning out for Enoch Robinson.

In New York City, when he first went there to live and before he became confused and disconcerted by the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men.  He got into a group of other young artists, both men and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to visit him in his room.  Once he got drunk and was taken to a police station where a police magistrate frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging house.  The woman and Enoch walked together three blocks and then the young man grew afraid and ran away.  The woman had been drinking and the incident amused her.  She leaned against the wall of a building and laughed so heartily that another man stopped and laughed with her.  The two went away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his room trembling and vexed.

The room in which young Robinson lived in New York faced Washington Square and was long and narrow like a hallway.  It is important to get that fixed in your mind.  The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man.

And so into the room in the evening came young Enoch’s friends.  There was nothing particularly striking about them except that they were artists of the kind that talk.  Everyone knows of the talking artists.  Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked.  They talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly, in earnest about it.  They think it matters much more than it does.

And so these people gathered and smoked cigarettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from the farm near Winesburg, was there.  He stayed in a corner and for the most part said nothing.  How his big blue childlike eyes stared about!  On the walls were pictures he had made, crude things, half finished.  His friends talked of these.  Leaning back in their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads rocking from side to side.  Words were said about line and values and composition, lots of words, such as are always being said.