Nance heard the two men stumble off down the street, the traveller protesting against the unbelief of his friend. It seemed to her that life with all of its color, sound and meaning was running away from her presence. The exhaust of the engine over at the mine rang in her ears. She thought of the mine as a great monster lying asleep below the ground, its huge nose stuck into the air, its mouth open to eat men. In the darkness of the room her coat, flung over the back of a chair, took the shape and outline of a face, huge and grotesque, staring silently past her into the sky. Nance McGregor gasped and struggled for breath. She clutched the bedclothes with her hands and fought grimly and silently. She did not think of the place to which she might go after death. She was trying hard not to go there. It had been her habit of life to fight, not to dream dreams. Nance thought of her father, drunk and throwing his money about, in the old days before her marriage, of the walks she, as a young girl, had taken with her lover on Sunday afternoons, and of the times when they had gone together to sit on the hillside overlooking the farming country. As in a vision, the dying woman saw the broad fertile land spread out before her, and blamed herself that she had not done more toward helping her man in the fulfillment of the plans she and he had made to go there and live. Then she thought of the night when her boy came, and of how, when they went to bring her man from the mine, they found him apparently dead under the fallen timbers so that she thought life and death had visited her hand in hand in one night. Nance sat stiffly up in bed. She thought she heard the sound of heavy feet on the stairs. “That will be Beaut coming up from the shop,” she muttered, and fell back upon the pillow, dead. Sherwood Anderson does not dwell on surfaces. His characters come out of the Unconscious. They move deep into a region where words can scarcely penetrate. As an instance of his understatements, I quote another scene from “Marching Men.” Beaut McGregor has climbed the hill to dream alone. He likes to go to the high places to pray. Three women come to him. Beaut has gotten over his timidity and consents to sit down with one of them, who is looked upon as a coquette. Here is a suggestive bit of Andersonian dialogue with little said and much understood: On the eminence Beaut and the tall woman sat and looked down into the valley. “I wonder why we don’t go there, mother and I,” he said. “When I see it I’m filled with the notion. I think I want to be a farmer and work in the fields. Instead of that, mother and I sit and plan of the city. I’m going to be a lawyer. That’s all we talk about. Then I come up here and it seems as though this is the place for me.”