he boy the position on the
Winesburg Eagle. Now, with a ring of earnestness in his
voice, he was advising concerning some course of
conduct. "I tell you what, George, you've got to wake
up," he said sharply. "Will Henderson has spoken to me
three times concerning the matter. He says you go along
for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting
like a gawky girl. What ails you?" Tom Willard laughed
good-naturedly. "Well, I guess you'll get over it," he
said. "I told Will that. You're not a fool and you're
not a woman. You're Tom Willard's son and you'll wake
up. I'm not afraid. What you say clears things up. If
being a newspaper man had put the notion of becoming a
writer into your mind that's all right. Only I guess
you'll have to wake up to do that too, eh?"

Tom Willard went briskly along the hallway and down a
flight of stairs to the office. The woman in the
darkness could hear him laughing and talking with a
guest who was striving to wear away a dull evening by
dozing in a chair by the office door. She returned to
the door of her son's room. The weakness had passed
from her body as by a miracle and she stepped boldly
along. A thousand ideas raced through her head. When
she heard the scraping of a chair and the sound of a
pen scratching upon paper, she again turned and went
back along the hallway to her own room.

A definite determination had come into the mind of the
defeated wife of the Winesburg hotel keeper. The
determination was the result of long years of quiet and
rather ineffectual thinking. "Now," she told herself,
"I will act. There is something threatening my boy and
I will ward it off." The fact that the conversation
between Tom Willard and his son had been rather quiet
and natural, as though an understanding existed between
them, maddened her. Although for years she had hated
her husband, her hatred had always before been a quite
impersonal thing. He had been merely a part of
something else that she hated. Now, and by the few
words at the door, he had become the thing personified.
In the darkness of her own room she clenched her fists
and glared about. Going to a cloth bag that hung on a
nail by the wall she took out a long pair of sewing
scissors and held them in her hand like a dagger. "I
will stab him," she said aloud. "He has chosen to be
the voice of evil and I will kill him. When I have
killed him something will snap within myself and I will
die also. It will be a release for all