when she had walked
with Ned Currie and of what he had said. "We will have
to stick to each other now." The words echoed and
re-echoed through the mind of the maturing woman. Tears
came into her eyes. Sometimes when her employer had
gone out and she was alone in the store she put her
head on the counter and wept. "Oh, Ned, I am waiting,"
she whispered over and over, and all the time the
creeping fear that he would never come back grew
stronger within her.

In the spring when the rains have passed and before the
long hot days of summer have come, the country about
Winesburg is delightful. The town lies in the midst of
open fields, but beyond the fields are pleasant patches
of woodlands. In the wooded places are many little
cloistered nooks, quiet places where lovers go to sit
on Sunday afternoons. Through the trees they look out
across the fields and see farmers at work about the
barns or people driving up and down on the roads. In
the town bells ring and occasionally a train passes,
looking like a toy thing in the distance.

For several years after Ned Currie went away Alice did
not go into the wood with the other young people on
Sunday, but one day after he had been gone for two or
three years and when her loneliness seemed unbearable,
she put on her best dress and set out. Finding a little
sheltered place from which she could see the town and a
long stretch of the fields, she sat down. Fear of age
and ineffectuality took possession of her. She could
not sit still, and arose. As she stood looking out over
the land something, perhaps the thought of never
ceasing life as it expresses itself in the flow of the
seasons, fixed her mind on the passing years. With a
shiver of dread, she realized that for her the beauty
and freshness of youth had passed. For the first time
she felt that she had been cheated. She did not blame
Ned Currie and did not know what to blame. Sadness
swept over her. Dropping to her knees, she tried to
pray, but instead of prayers words of protest came to
her lips. "It is not going to come to me. I will never
find happiness. Why do I tell myself lies?" she cried,
and an odd sense of relief came with this, her first
bold attempt to face the fear that had become a part of
her everyday life.

In the year when Alice Hindman became twenty-five two
things happened to disturb the dull uneventfulness of
her days. Her mother married Bush Milton, the carriage
painter of Winesburg, and she herself be