It was past eleven o’clock that evening when old Enoch, talking to George Willard in the room in the Heffner Block, came to the vital thing, the story of the woman and of what drove him out of the city to live out his life alone and defeated in Winesburg. He sat on a cot by the window with his head in his hand and George Willard was in a chair by a table. A kerosene lamp sat on the table and the room, although almost bare of furniture, was scrupulously clean. As the man talked George Willard began to feel that he would like to get out of the chair and sit on the cot also. He wanted to put his arms about the little old man. In the half darkness the man talked and the boy listened, filled with sadness. “She got to coming in there after there hadn’t been anyone in the room for years,” said Enoch Robinson. “She saw me in the hallway of the house and we got acquainted. I don’t know just what she did in her own room. I never went there. I think she was a musician and played a violin. Every now and then she came and knocked at the door and I opened it. In she came and sat down beside me, just sat and looked about and said nothing. Anyway, she said nothing that mattered.” The old man arose from the cot and moved about the room. The overcoat he wore was wet from the rain and drops of water kept falling with a soft thump on the floor. When he again sat upon the cot George Willard got out of the chair and sat beside him. “I had a feeling about her. She sat there in the room with me and she was too big for the room. I felt that she was driving everything else away. We just talked of little things, but I couldn’t sit still. I wanted to touch her with my fingers and to kiss her. Her hands were so strong and her face was so good and she looked at me all the time.” The trembling voice of the old man became silent and his body shook as from a chill. “I was afraid,” he whispered. “I was terribly afraid. I didn’t want to let her come in when she knocked at the door but I couldn’t sit still. ‘No, no,’ I said to myself, but I got up and opened the door just the same. She was so grown up, you see. She was a woman. I thought she would be bigger than I was there in that room.” Enoch Robinson stared at George Willard, his childlike blue eyes shining in the lamplight. Again he shivered. “I wanted her and all the time I didn’t want her,” he explained. “Then I began to tell her about my people, about everything that meant anything to me. I tried to keep quiet, to keep myself to myself, but I couldn’t. I felt just as I did about opening the door. Sometimes I ached to have her go away and never come back any more.”