The following version of the story was used to make the guide: Henry, O. "The Last Leaf". The Trimmed Lamp and Other Stories of the Four Million. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1919. pp.198-208

The Greenwich Village neighborhood of lower New York City is a quaint old enclave of lovely colonial architecture and narrow, disjointed streets on which it is easy for the unfamiliar to get lost. Because of these charms, the cheap rents, and the added benefit of making it more challenging for the bill collectors to find them, the city’s creative and free-thinking types streamed in, founding a an artistic colony that developed into an international community of turn-of-the-20th-century bohemian counterculture.

In a squat brick building, Sue and Johanna (known by the nickname Johnsy) have their joint studio and living space. The two met the previous May at a shared table in a local Delmonico’s restaurant, and they discovered quickly that they shared many common interests in food, clothing and art, and they soon decided to move in together. It is now a cold wet November, and a city-wide outbreak of pneumonia has been felling droves of New Yorkers, sparing the remote Greenwich Village community until just recently, likely due again to the neighborhood’s maddening street plan. Johnsy is originally from California, and the narrator suggests that being bred in the warm, dry, Western climate has endowed her with a fragile constitution and made her particularly susceptible to the infection. Sue is from Maine and has been taking care of the critically ill Johnsy. The doctor has just paid a visit and confides in Sue that he done all he medically can for Johnsy, who has become fixated on the idea of her certain coming death and stubbornly refuses to think positively and thus improve her chances for a better outcome. In her current state of morbid obsession, the doctor gives Johnsy just a ten percent chance of survival and wonders if there is anything Johnsy considers worth living for. Sue tells the doctor that Johnnsy has always wanted to travel to Italy and paint the Bay of Naples, but the doctor dismisses that plan as valueless compared to a woman’s expectation to find a man to marry.

Sitting in a chair by the window, Sue overhears Johnsy mumbling to herself, and when Sue asks what she is doing, Johnsy answers that she has been counting the leaves on the gnarled, withering ivy vine growing on the brick wall of the building next door. For three days, Johnsy says she has been counting the leaves of ivy as they have been falling off the vine with the coming winter and she has become convinces that when the last leaf falls, she too will die. There are now just four leaves left on the ivy vine outside, and Johnsy expects that she will die sometime before morning. When Sue announces she will go downstairs to ask their neighbor old Mr. Behrman to pose for her illustration of a grizzled old Western miner for a series she is working on for a magazine story, she makes Johnsy promise not to stare out the window.

Mr. Bherman is a 60 year old artistic failure, constantly drunk on gin, with a long beard and impish appearance who speaks in a heavy German accent. His downstairs lodgings are dark and sparse, the room dominated by a blank canvas on an easel, on which Mr. Behrman has been convinced for 25 years he will someday begin work on as his masterpiece-to-be. When Sue tells him of poor, little Johnsy’s desperate predicament, the cantankerous old Mr. Behrman’s eyes well up with tears and he curses such a foolishness as hers, agitating himself and angering Sue, who defends Johnsy as being in the grips of a feverish morbidity. The two go back upstairs, and before Sue has Behrman model for her, she takes him into another room to point out the dying ivy vine through the window, down to its last leaf, with Sue and Behrman exchanging e a long, knowing and silent look.

The next morning, after a cold and stormy night, Johnsy commands Sue to open the window. There, against the wind and rain, the last leaf remained. Johnsy is surprised to see it, but is still convinced it will fall that day and she will die, and she stares out the window all day until dark As soon as it is light again, Johnsy orders Sue to open the shade, and against all likelihood, the leaf is still there. This time, Johnsy takes the leaf’s presence as a providential signal of the error and wickedness of her recent mind-state, and seems back to her old self as she demands a hand mirror and finally allows Sue to bring her port wine and chicken broth. An hour later, Johnsy calls out from her bedroom announcing her hope to paint in Naples, and when the doctor calls later that day he pronounces Johnsy much improved though in need of care and nourishment. The doctor tells Sue that he must go downstairs to see Mr. Behrman, who is by then too far gone with pneumonia to save, but will be admitted to the hospital to die in comfort.

The next day, the doctor comes again tells Sue that her care has helped and now Johnsy is out of danger. Later, Sue goes in to sit on Johnsy’s bed and tell her that Sue heard from the doctor that Mr. Behrman died that morning in the hospital. He had been found by the janitor two days earlier in a painful, delirious state with his soaking wet clothing discarded in a heap. Outside, the janitor found a ladder left propped against the wall and a mess of painting supplies left out overnight. Sue joyfully tells Johnsy that the night he saw the last leaf on the vine, Mr. Behrman decided to paint a decaying, green and gold Ivy leaf on the neighboring wall to look just like it was growing from the vine. In Johnsy’s weakened state, she was never able to tell that for two days she had been fooled by Mr. Behrman’s masterpiece that he finally got to paint before he died.