In almost every case the great issue of suppressed sensibilities in Anderson’s stories is eroticism. This is the central pivot of the lives of his larvæ. The male wants to be rich quick. He has not time to love; he simply flirts. The female, on the contrary, is like Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, in Racine’s tragedy, _toute entière à sa proie attachée_, all intent upon securing the gratification of her instinctive impulses. Man makes up for his erotic disillusions by irony, work or drink.[46] Woman simply surrenders to the _libido_. Inhibitions and repressions make an agony of her life. Anderson suggests that she come out of the “well” for the sake of health, happiness and moral progress. Surrendering to nature and not asceticism is the cure of morbidity. He sides with Hawthorne on this point, and he proves it in one of the best tales of “Winesburg, Ohio.” We see the Reverend Hartman released from the nightmares of his cell by facing life as it is and discovering that religion and beauty can very well go together. Evasion, it is true, is not within the reach of every one in Anderson’s books. It is reserved to the elect. Many try to lift the lid of the “well” and are drowned. The most pathetic case of evasion is that of Elsie in “The Triumph of The Egg.” The story is called “The New Englander.” Elsie is an uprooted girl from the East. She dies of moral dearth and inhibited desires, somewhere on a lonely farm in the Middle West. One day homesickness and longing make her run away in the corn-fields with the same pagan fury which took Hester Prynne to the primitive forest. The scene is literarily beautiful and almost technically Freudian: In the month of August, when it is very hot, the corn in Iowa fields grows until the corn stalks resemble young trees. The corn-fields become forests. The time for the cultivating of the corn has passed and weeds grow thick between the corn rows. The men with their giant horses have gone away. Over the immense fields silence broods. When the time of the laying-by of the crop came that first summer after Elsie’s arrival in the West, her mind, partially awakened by the strangeness of the railroad trip, awakened again. She did not feel like a staid, thin woman with a back like the back of a drill sergeant, but like something new and as strange as the new land into which she had come to live. For a time she did not know what was the matter. In the field the corn had grown so high that she could not see into the distance. The corn was like a wall and the little bare spot on which her father’s house stood was like a house built behind the walls of a prison. For a time she was depressed, thinking that she had come west into a wide open country, only to find herself locked up more closely than ever. An impulse came to her. She arose and going down three or four steps seated herself almost on a level with the ground.