This woman also smiled and her smile was now an invitation. Tom got to his feet and hurried away down the hill and going stealthily past the barns and the house got into a road. All night he walked under the stars thinking new thoughts. “I am obsessed with this idea of having a woman. I’d better go to the city and go to school and see if I can make myself fit to have a woman of my own,” he thought. “I won’t sleep tonight but will wait until tomorrow when Bottsford comes back and then I’ll quit and go into the city.” He walked, trying to make plans. Even a good man like John Bottsford, had a woman for himself. Could he do that? The thought was exciting. At the moment it seemed to him that he had only to go into the city, and go to the schools for a time, to become beautiful and to have beautiful women love him. In his half ecstatic state he forgot the winter months he had spent in the city of Cleveland, and forgot also the grim streets, the long rows of dark prison-like factories and the loneliness of his life in the city. For the moment and as he walked in the dusty roads under the moon, he thought of American towns and cities as places for beautifully satisfying adventures, for all such fellows as himself. THE END PRINTED IN U.S.A. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ● Transcriber’s Notes: ○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected. ○ Typographical errors were silently corrected. ○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book. ○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_). End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Horses and Men, by Sherwood Anderson