a neighborhood sprinkled with houses of
prostitution. The women in the houses knew and loved
Tom Foster and the tough boys in the gangs loved him
also.

He never asserted himself. That was one thing that
helped him escape. In an odd way he stood in the shadow
of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.
He saw the men and women in the houses of lust, sensed
their casual and horrible love affairs, saw boys
fighting and listened to their tales of thieving and
drunkenness, unmoved and strangely unaffected.

Once Tom did steal. That was while he still lived in
the city. The grandmother was ill at the time and he
himself was out of work. There was nothing to eat in
the house, and so he went into a harness shop on a side
street and stole a dollar and seventy-five cents out of
the cash drawer.

The harness shop was run by an old man with a long
mustache. He saw the boy lurking about and thought
nothing of it. When he went out into the street to talk
to a teamster Tom opened the cash drawer and taking the
money walked away. Later he was caught and his
grandmother settled the matter by offering to come
twice a week for a month and scrub the shop. The boy
was ashamed, but he was rather glad, too. "It is all
right to be ashamed and makes me understand new
things," he said to the grandmother, who didn't know
what the boy was talking about but loved him so much
that it didn't matter whether she understood or not.

For a year Tom Foster lived in the banker's stable and
then lost his place there. He didn't take very good
care of the horses and he was a constant source of
irritation to the banker's wife. She told him to mow
the lawn and he forgot. Then she sent him to the store
or to the post office and he did not come back but
joined a group of men and boys and spent the whole
afternoon with them, standing about, listening and
occasionally, when addressed, saying a few words. As in
the city in the houses of prostitution and with the
rowdy boys running through the streets at night, so in
Winesburg among its citizens he had always the power to
be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life
about him.

After Tom lost his place at Banker White's he did not
live with his grandmother, although often in the
evening she came to visit him. He rented a room at the
rear of a little frame building belonging to old Rufus
Whiting. The building was on Duane Street, just off
Main Street, and had been used for years as