![]() ![]() Tom Willard had a passion for village politics and for years had been the leading Democrat in a strongly Republican community. "Damn such a life, damn it!" he sputtered aimlessly. As he went spruce and business-like through the streets of Winesburg, he sometimes stopped and turned quickly about as though fearing that the spirit of the hotel and of the woman would follow him even into the streets. The hotel in which he had begun life so hopefully was now a mere ghost of what a hotel should be. He thought of the old house and the woman who lived there with him as things defeated and done for. The hotel was unprofitable and forever on the edge of failure and he wished himself out of it. When he thought of her he grew angry and swore. ![]() ![]() The presence of the tall ghostly figure, moving slowly through the halls, he took as a reproach to himself. Her husband, Tom Willard, a slender, graceful man with square shoulders, a quick military step, and a black mustache trained to turn sharply up at the ends, tried to put the wife out of his mind. Listlessly she went about the disorderly old hotel looking at the faded wall-paper and the ragged carpets and, when she was able to be about, doing the work of a chambermaid among beds soiled by the slumbers of fat traveling men. Although she was but forty-five, some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her figure. ELIZABETH WILLARD, the mother of George Willard, was tall and gaunt and her face was marked with smallpox scars. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |