The summer evening together that had left its mark on the memory of both the young man and woman had, when looked at quite sensibly, been rather stupidly spent.  They had walked out of town along a country road.  Then they had stopped by a fence near a field of young corn and George had taken off his coat and let it hang on his arm.  “Well, I’ve stayed here in Winesburg—­yes—­I’ve not yet gone away but I’m growing up,” he had said.  “I’ve been reading books and I’ve been thinking.  I’m going to try to amount to something in life.

“Well,” he explained, “that isn’t the point.  Perhaps I’d better quit talking.”

The confused boy put his hand on the girl’s arm.  His voice trembled.  The two started to walk back along the road toward town.  In his desperation George boasted, “I’m going 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.