Loneliness

He was the son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once owned a
farm on a side road leading off Trunion Pike, east of
Winesburg and two miles beyond the town limits. The
farmhouse was painted brown and the blinds to all of
the windows facing the road were kept closed. In the
road before the house a flock of chickens, accompanied
by two guinea hens, lay in the deep dust. Enoch lived
in the house with his mother in those days and when he
was a young boy went to school at the Winesburg High
School. Old citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling
youth inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of
the road when he came into town and sometimes read a
book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to make
him realize where he was so that he would turn out of
the beaten track and let them pass.

When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went to New York
City and was a city man for fifteen years. He studied
French and went to an art school, hoping to develop a
faculty he had for drawing. In his own mind he planned
to go to Paris and to finish his art education among
the masters there, but that never turned out.

Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He could
draw well enough and he had many odd delicate thoughts
hidden away in his brain that might have expressed
themselves through the brush of a painter, but he was
always a child and that was a handicap to his worldly
development. He never grew up and of course he couldn't
understand people and he couldn't make people
understand him. The child in him kept bumping against
things, against actualities like money and sex and
opinions. Once he was hit by a street car and thrown
against an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of
the many things that kept things from turning out for
Enoch Robinson.

In New York City, when he first went there to live and
before he became confused and disconcerted by the facts
of life, Enoch went about a good deal with young men.
He got into a group of other young artists, both men
and women, and in the evenings they sometimes came to
visit him in his room. Once he got drunk and was taken
to a police station where a police magistrate
frightened him horribly, and once he tried to have an
affair with a woman of the town met on the sidewalk
before his lodging house. The woman and Enoch walked
together three blocks and then the young man grew
afraid and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall of
a building and laughed so heartily that another man
stopped and laughed with her. The two went away
together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to his
room trembling and vexed.

The room in which young Robinson lived in