The dead woman’s son sat down in a chair and looked at the floor.  He again thought of his own affairs and definitely decided he would make a change in his life, that he would leave Winesburg.  “I will go to some city.  Perhaps I can get a job on some newspaper,” he thought, and then his mind turned to the girl with whom he was to have spent this evening and again he was half angry at the turn of events that had prevented his going to her.

In the dimly lighted room with the dead woman the young man began to have thoughts.  His mind played with thoughts of life as his mother’s mind had played with the thought of death.  He closed his eyes and imagined that the red young lips of Helen White touched his own lips.  His body trembled and his hands shook.  And then something happened.  The boy sprang to his feet and stood stiffly.  He looked at the figure of the dead woman under the sheets and shame for his thoughts swept over him so that he began to weep.  A new notion came into his mind and he turned and looked guiltily about as though afraid he would be observed.

George Willard became possessed of a madness to lift the sheet from the body of his mother and look at her face.  The thought that had come into his mind gripped him terribly.  He became convinced that not his mother but someone else lay in the bed before him.  The conviction was so real that it was almost unbearable.  The body under the sheets was long and in death looked young and graceful.  To the boy, held by some strange fancy, it was unspeakably lovely.  The feeling that the body before him was alive, that in another moment a lovely woman would spring out of the bed and confront him, became so overpowering that he could not bear the suspense.  Again and again he put out his hand.  Once he touched and half lifted the white sheet that covered her, but his courage failed and he, like Doctor Reefy, turned and went out of the room.  In the hallway outside the door he stopped and trembled so that he had to put a hand against the wall to support himself.  “That’s not my mother.  That’s not my mother in there,” he whispered to himself and again his body shook with fright and uncertainty.  When Aunt Elizabeth Swift, who had come to watch over the body, came out of an adjoining room he put his hand into hers and began to sob, shaking his head from side to side, half blind with grief.  “My mother is dead,” he said, and then forgetting the woman he turned and stared at the door through which he had just come.  “The dear, the dear, oh the lovely dear,” the boy, urged by some impulse outside himself, muttered aloud.

As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother’s bed.  Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick.  Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall.  “I jammed the corner of the bed against it,” she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms.