nd put on a black alpaca coat that had become
shabby with age. At night when he returned to his home he donned another
black alpaca coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the
streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for the purpose. The
trousers to his street suit were placed between the boards and the
boards were clamped together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped
the boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind the dining
room door. If they were moved during the day he was speechless with
anger and did not recover his equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of his daughter. She,
he realized, knew the story of his brutal treatment of the girl's mother
and hated him for it. One day she went home at noon and carried a
handful of soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the mud
she smeared the face of the boards used for the pressing of trousers and
then went back to her work feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening with George
Willard, a reporter on the Winesburg Eagle. Secretly she loved another
man, but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused her much
anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby, bartender in Ed Griffith's
Saloon, and went about with the young reporter as a kind of relief to
her feelings. She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender, and she walked about
under the trees with George Willard and let him kiss her to relieve a
longing that was very insistent in her nature. She felt that she could
keep the younger man within bounds. About Ed Handby she was somewhat
uncertain.

Handby, the bartender, was a tall broad-shouldered man of thirty who
lived in a room upstairs above Griffith's saloon. His fists were large
and his eyes unusually small but his voice, as though striving to
conceal the power back of his fists, was soft and quiet.

At twenty-five the bartender had inherited a large farm from an uncle in
Indiana. When sold the farm brought in eight thousand dollars which Ed
spent in six months. Going to Sandusky, on Lake Erie, he began an orgy
of dissipation, the story of which afterward filled his home town with
awe. Here and there he went throwing the money about, driving carriages
through the streets, giving wine parties to crowds of men and women,
playing cards for high stakes and keeping mistresses whose ward