Winesburg, Ohio: Respectability

If you have lived in cities and have walked in the park on a summer afternoon, you have perhaps seen, blinking in a corner of his iron cage, a huge, grotesque kind of monkey, a creature with ugly, sagging, hairless skin below his eyes and a bright purple underbody. This monkey is a true monster.

His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble.

In his youth Wash Williams had been called the best telegraph operator in the state, and in spite of his degradement to the obscure office at Winesburg, he was still proud of his ability.

"I'll have nothing to do with them," he said, looking with bleary eyes at the men who walked along the station platform past the telegraph office.

Up along Main Street he went in the evening to Ed Griffith's saloon...

Once Mrs. White, the banker's wife, complained to the telegraph company, saying that the office in Winesburg was dirty and smelled abominably, but nothing came of her complaint.

Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.

Instinctively the man felt in him a glowing resentment of something he had not the courage to resent.

When Wash walked through the streets such a one had an instinct to pay him homage, to raise his hat or to bow before him.

Wash was himself a comely youth.

George Willard went one evening to walk with Belle Carpenter, a trimmer of women's hats who worked in a millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh.

The young man looked at the hideous, leering face staring about the hotel dining room and was consumed with curiosity.

On the pile of railroad ties on the summer evening, he waited expectantly.

Wash Williams spat forth a succession of vile oaths.

Here and there his story was touched with moments of beauty intermingled with strings of vile curses.

With a kind of religious fervor he had managed to go through the pitfalls of his youth....

There in the dusk in the spring evening I crawled along the black ground to her feet and groveled before her.

Their house was stylish. They were what is called respectable people.

There were plush chairs and a couch in the room.

While I sat there she was taking the girl's clothes off, perhaps coaxing her to do it.