Tom Foster enjoyed life in Winesburg.  He did odd jobs, such as cutting wood for kitchen stoves and mowing the grass before houses.  In late May and early June he picked strawberries in the fields.  He had time to loaf and he enjoyed loafing.  Banker White had given him a cast-off coat which was too large for him, but his grandmother cut it down, and he had also an overcoat, got at the same place, that was lined with fur.  The fur was worn away in spots, but the coat was warm and in the winter Tom slept in it.  He thought his method of getting along good enough and was happy and satisfied with the way life in Winesburg had turned out for him.

The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy.  That, I suppose, was why people loved him.  In Hern’s Grocery they would be roasting coffee on Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street.  Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store.  For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still, filling his being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with happiness.  “I like it,” he said gently.  “It makes me think of things far away, places and things like that.”

One night Tom Foster got drunk.  That came about in a curious way.  He never had been drunk before, and indeed in all his life had never taken a drink of anything intoxicating, but he felt he needed to be drunk that one time and so went and did it.

In Cincinnati, when he lived there, Tom had found out many things, things about ugliness and crime and lust.  Indeed, he knew more of these things than anyone else in Winesburg.  The matter of sex in particular had presented itself to him in a quite horrible way and had made a deep impression on his mind.  He thought, after what he had seen of the women standing before the squalid houses on cold nights and the look he had seen in the eyes of the men who stopped to talk to them, that he would put sex altogether out of his own life.  One of the women of the neighborhood tempted him once and he went into a room with her.  He never forgot the smell of the room nor the greedy look that came into the eyes of the woman.  It sickened him and in a very terrible way left a scar on his soul.  He had always before thought of women as quite innocent things, much like his grandmother, but after that one experience in the room he dismissed women from his mind.  So gentle was his nature that he could not hate anything and not being able to understand he decided to forget.

And Tom did forget until he came to Winesburg.  After he had lived there for two years something began to stir in him.  On all sides he saw youth making love and he was himself a youth.  Before he knew what had happened he was in love also.  He fell in love with Helen White, daughter of the man for whom he had worked, and found himself thinking of her at night.

That was a problem for Tom and he settled it in his own way.  He let himself think of Helen White whenever her figure came into his mind and only concerned himself with the manner of his thoughts.  He had a fight, a quiet determined little fight of his own, to keep his desires in the channel where he thought they belonged, but on the whole he was victorious.