to be a big man, the biggest that ever lived
here in Winesburg," he declared. "I want you to do
something, I don't know what. Perhaps it is none of my
business. I want you to try to be different from other
women. You see the point. It's none of my business I
tell you. I want you to be a beautiful woman. You see
what I want."

The boy's voice failed and in silence the two came back
into town and went along the street to Helen White's
house. At the gate he tried to say something
impressive. Speeches he had thought out came into his
head, but they seemed utterly pointless. "I thought--I
used to think--I had it in my mind you would marry Seth
Richmond. Now I know you won't," was all he could find
to say as she went through the gate and toward the door
of her house.

On the warm fall evening as he stood in the stairway
and looked at the crowd drifting through Main Street,
George thought of the talk beside the field of young
corn and was ashamed of the figure he had made of
himself. In the street the people surged up and down
like cattle confined in a pen. Buggies and wagons
almost filled the narrow thoroughfare. A band played
and small boys raced along the sidewalk, diving between
the legs of men. Young men with shining red faces
walked awkwardly about with girls on their arms. In a
room above one of the stores, where a dance was to be
held, the fiddlers tuned their instruments. The broken
sounds floated down through an open window and out
across the murmur of voices and the loud blare of the
horns of the band. The medley of sounds got on young
Willard's nerves. Everywhere, on all sides, the sense
of crowding, moving life closed in about him. He wanted
to run away by himself and think. "If she wants to stay
with that fellow she may. Why should I care? What
difference does it make to me?" he growled and went
along Main Street and through Hern's Grocery into a
side street.

George felt so utterly lonely and dejected that he
wanted to weep but pride made him walk rapidly along,
swinging his arms. He came to Wesley Moyer's livery
barn and stopped in the shadows to listen to a group of
men who talked of a race Wesley's stallion, Tony Tip,
had won at the Fair during the afternoon. A crowd had
gathered in front of the barn and before the crowd
walked Wesley, prancing up and down boasting. He held a
whip in his hand and kept tapping the ground. Little
puffs of dust arose in the lamplight. "Hell, quit your
talking," We