An Awakening

Belle Carpenter had a dark skin, grey eyes, and thick
lips. She was tall and strong. When black thoughts
visited her she grew angry and wished she were a man
and could fight someone with her fists. She worked in
the millinery shop kept by Mrs. Kate McHugh and during
the day sat trimming hats by a window at the rear of
the store. She was the daughter of Henry Carpenter,
bookkeeper in the First National Bank of Winesburg, and
lived with him in a gloomy old house far out at the end
of Buckeye Street. The house was surrounded by pine
trees and there was no grass beneath the trees. A rusty
tin eaves-trough had slipped from its fastenings at the
back of the house and when the wind blew it beat
against the roof of a small shed, making a dismal
drumming noise that sometimes persisted all through the
night.

When she was a young girl Henry Carpenter made life
almost unbearable for Belle, but as she emerged from
girlhood into womanhood he lost his power over her. The
bookkeeper's life was made up of innumerable little
pettinesses. When he went to the bank in the morning he
stepped into a closet and put on a black alpaca coat
that had become shabby with age. At night when he
returned to his home he donned another black alpaca
coat. Every evening he pressed the clothes worn in the
streets. He had invented an arrangement of boards for
the purpose. The trousers to his street suit were
placed between the boards and the boards were clamped
together with heavy screws. In the morning he wiped the
boards with a damp cloth and stood them upright behind
the dining room door. If they were moved during the day
he was speechless with anger and did not recover his
equilibrium for a week.

The bank cashier was a little bully and was afraid of
his daughter. She, he realized, knew the story of his
brutal treatment of her mother and hated him for it.
One day she went home at noon and carried a handful of
soft mud, taken from the road, into the house. With the
mud she smeared the face of the boards used for the
pressing of trousers and then went back to her work
feeling relieved and happy.

Belle Carpenter occasionally walked out in the evening
with George Willard. Secretly she loved another man,
but her love affair, about which no one knew, caused
her much anxiety. She was in love with Ed Handby,
bartender in Ed Griffith's Saloon, and went about with
the young reporter as a kind of relief to her feelings.
She did not think that her station in life would permit
her to be seen in the company of the bartender and
walked about under the trees with George Willard and
let him kiss her to relieve a longing that was very
insistent in her nature. She felt that she could