The voice of the sick man became tense with earnestness.  Being unable to arise, he put out his hand and pulled the girl’s head down beside his own.  “There’s a way out,” he whispered.  “Don’t marry Tom Willard or anyone else here in Winesburg.  There is eight hundred dollars in a tin box in my trunk.  Take it and go away.”

Again the sick man’s voice became querulous.  “You’ve got to promise,” he declared.  “If you won’t promise not to marry, give me your word that you’ll never tell Tom about the money.  It is mine and if I give it to you I’ve the right to make that demand.  Hide it away.  It is to make up to you for my failure as a father.  Some time it may prove to be a door, a great open door to you.  Come now, I tell you I’m about to die, give me your promise.”

* * *

In Doctor Reefy’s office, Elizabeth, a tired gaunt old woman at forty-one, sat in a chair near the stove and looked at the floor.  By a small desk near the window sat the doctor.  His hands played with a lead pencil that lay on the desk.  Elizabeth talked of her life as a married woman.  She became impersonal and forgot her husband, only using him as a lay figure to give point to her tale.  “And then I was married and it did not turn out at all,” she said bitterly.  “As soon as I had gone into it I began to be afraid.  Perhaps I knew too much before and then perhaps I found out too much during my first night with him.  I don’t remember.

“What a fool I was.  When father gave me the money and tried to talk me out of the thought of marriage, I would not listen.  I thought of what the girls who were married had said of it and I wanted marriage also.  It wasn’t Tom I wanted, it was marriage.  When father went to sleep I leaned out of the window and thought of the life I had led.  I didn’t want to be a bad woman.  The town was full of stories about me.  I even began to be afraid Tom would change his mind.”

The woman’s voice began to quiver with excitement.  To Doctor Reefy, who without realizing what was happening had begun to love her, there came an odd illusion.  He thought that as she talked the woman’s body was changing, that she was becoming younger, straighter, stronger.  When he could not shake off the illusion his mind gave it a professional twist.  “It is good for both her body and her mind, this talking,” he muttered.

The woman began telling of an incident that had happened one afternoon a few months after her marriage.  Her voice became steadier.  “In the late afternoon I went for a drive alone,” she said.  “I had a buggy and a little grey pony I kept in Moyer’s Livery.  Tom was painting and repapering rooms in the hotel.  He wanted money and I was trying to make up my mind to tell him about the eight hundred dollars father had given to me.  I couldn’t decide to do it.  I didn’t like him well enough.  There was always paint on his hands and face during those days and he smelled of paint.  He was trying to fix up the old hotel, and make it new and smart.”